Early endothelial progenitor cells in bone marrow are a biomarker of cell therapy success in patients with critical limb ischemia.

Background Aims: Endothelial progenitor cells (EPC) have been proposed for autologous angiogenic therapy. The objectives of this study were to quantify EPC in the peripheral blood and bone marrow mononuclear cells (BM-MNC) of patients with critical limb ischemia that had received BM-MNC as a cell therapy product, and to study the putative relationship between the presence of EPC and the process of neovascularization in toe or transmetatarsal amputation specimens.

Methods: Early and late endothelial progenitor cells (CFU-EC and ECFC) were cultivated and quantified according to published methods in peripheral blood and BM-MNC from patients with critical limb ischemia (CLI; n = 11) enrolled in the OPTIPEC trial ( http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00377897 ) to receive BM-MNC as a cell therapy product.

Results: Eight out of the 11 patients had undergone amputations. Three of the patients displayed a neoangiogenic process that was associated with a higher number of CFU-EC in BM-MNC, while CD3+ , CFU-GM and CD34+ in BM-MNC, and EPC in peripheral blood, did not correlate with the appearance of newly formed vessels. As expected, circulating CFU-EC and ECFC counts were significantly lower in CLI patients compared with age-matched controls.

Conclusions: In patients with critical limb ischemia, EPC in peripheral blood were decreased compared with healthy individuals. However, in BM-MNC we found that relative numbers of CFU-EC could be used as an indicator to discriminate patients with neoangiogenic processes. These results need to be confirmed in a randomized study.