Effects of NGF and BDNF on chondrocytes: a microarray analysis

Osteoarthritis (OA) represents an inflammation-driven injury of articular tissues, progressively leading to structural and functional joint impairment. The main symptom of OA is pain. Although it has been well established that OA represents a whole joint disease, the source of pain remains to be clarified. Nowadays, it has been well established that neurotrophines expression is evident in joints affected by OA. In addition, elevated NGF levels are found in the synovial fluid of patients with inflammatory or degenerative rheumatic diseases, including OA, rheumatoid arthritis and spondylarthritis. Growing evidences indicate that blocking NGF signaling using an anti NGF agent (i.e. tanezumab) provides effective pain relief. This study analyzed the effects of NGF and BDNF on cultured human chondrocytes by evaluating and their effects on chondrogenesis, chondrocyte differentiation and cartilage degeneration through a microarray analysis. The whole transcriptome analysis performed in this study highlighted how NGF and BDNF could be able to induce a proinflammatory response in human chondrocytes. Moreover, NGF and BDNF treatments seems to be able to induce the activation of several genes involved in the OA pathogenesis as IL17AR, HLA-DRB1, GDF-15, NR1D1, MCF2L and TGF-Beta.