Rapid Disease Progression of Myelodysplastic Syndrome is Reflected in Transcriptomic and Functional Abnormalities of Bone Marrow MSCs

Current investigations of MDS-MSCs rely heavily on the clinical international prognostic scoring system (IPSS) or revised IPSS (IPSS-R) of MDS to classify them into either the low- or high-risk categories. This approach, however, suffers from shortcomings, as it is based on assessments of the hematopoietic parameters and may not capture important biological changes or predictors in MDS-MSCs during disease progression. Herein, to focus the investigation on discovering unique characteristics and dominant effects of MDS-MSCs in conditions of fast vs slow transforming disease, we retrospectively examined and selected MDS BM samples from these two patient categories: those with transformation to AML in less than 2 years (MDSfast) or after 2 years (MDSslow) following sample collection. Overall design: Mesenchymal stromal cells were derived from bone marrow aspirate and cultured for 1 passage before RNA extraction for bulk sequencing.