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Career switch for EC-CFU to modelling.

This editorial refers to ‘The constituents and mechanisms of generation of ‘endothelial cell—colony forming units’’ by G.J. Padfield et al. , pp. 288–296, this issue. 

Following the paper by Asahara et al. 1 in 1997, research into the role of circulating endothelial progenitor cells in vascular regeneration and neovascularization has led to many novel insights into monocyte-macrophage differentiation, the kinship between haematopoietic stem cells and angioblasts, and the role of innate immunity in vascular repair. It has gradually become acknowledged that the classically retrieved blood mononuclear fraction contains at least two flavours of circulating progenitor cells, the late outgrowth endothelial cells and the cells giving rise to endothelial cell colony-forming units (EC-CFUs). From the study by Padfield et al .,2 it is evident that the EC-CFU is a mixture of CD14+/CD68+ myeloid cells and T- and B-lymphocytes rather than CD34+ cells and therefore do not represent an endothelial precursor cell per se . The observations do confirm the gain of endothelial marker expression of the CD14+ fraction,3 but emphasize that this can reflect monocyte activation, rather than differentiation into endothelial cells. Besides the gain of endothelial markers, such as CD105, CD146, and Tie2, which are expressed by certain monocyte subtypes as well, a continuous expression of the leukocyte marker CD45 and an increase of the macrophage marker …