A Systematic Approach to Identify Markers of Distinctly Activated Human Macrophages. Homo sapiens

Polarization has been a useful concept for describing activated macrophage phenotypes and gene expression profiles. However, macrophage activation status within tumors and other settings are often inferred based on only a few markers. Complicating matters for relevance to human biology, many of the best studied macrophage activation markers have been best characterized in mice and sometimes are not similarly regulated in human macrophages. To identify novel markers of activated human macrophages, gene expression profiles for human macrophages of a single donor subjected to 33 distinct activating conditions were obtained and a set of putative activation markers were subsequently evaluated in macrophages from multiple donors using integrated fluidic circuit (IFC)-based RT-PCR. Using unsupervised hierarchical clustering of the microarray screen, highly-altered transcripts (>4-fold change in expression) sorted the macrophage transcription profiles into two major and 13 minor clusters. Among the 1874 highly-altered transcripts, over 100 were uniquely altered in one major or two related minor clusters. IFC PCR-derived data confirmed the microarray results and to show the kinetics of expression of potential macrophage activation markers. Transcripts encoding chemokines, cytokines, and cell surface were prominent in our analyses. The activation markers identified by this study could be used to better characterize tumor-associated macrophages from biopsies as well as other macrophage populations collected from human clinical samples. Overall design: 36 samples total from primary human monocyte-derived macrophages (3 technical replicates for untreated controls and 33 individual samples of uniquely activated macrophage types)