In collaboration with Anjali Kusumbe’s team of the University of Oxford, Junyu Chen, an associate professor of the West China Hospital of Stomatology, Sichuan University, made an important breakthrough in the functional regulation of the lymphatic circulation system in the repair of osteoinflammatory injury, and published as the co-first author the latest research results "Lymphatic Vessels in Bone Support Regeneration after Injury" online in Cell. Zhangfan Ding, a Class 2019 doctor from WCHS participated in the study.

Previous studies have believed that the lymphatic circulatory system only exists in the bone in pathological state, and it is a historical controversial problem whether the lymphatic circulatory system exists in normal bone tissue. The research developed a new tissue transparency technology, which could realize three-dimensional imaging of hard tissue at the organ level, and comprehensively revealed the existence of lymphatic circulation system in normal bone tissue for the first time.

This study further found that under the radiation and other inflammatory injury mode, the lymphatic system in bone tissue proliferated significantly, and the LECs could positively regulate Myh11+mesenchymal cells through paracrine CXCL12 growth factor to promote the recovery of bone marrow hematopoietic function and bone regeneration at the injured site, which explained the positive regulation of the lymphatic circulation system on bone regeneration and the mechanism of participating in bone injury repair.

This study revealed that lymphatic vessels not only exist in bone tissue, but also play a role in bone and bone marrow regeneration, so as to explore the regulatory function of lymphatic system in osteoinflammatory injury diseases (such as osteoarthritis, radioactive bone injury, etc.), which has important implications for the development of new treatment methods for bone and circulatory system diseases.

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)01574-4#%20