Hemangiomas that are strawberry like birthmarks commonly seen during early infancy and believed to be harmless could result in tissue distortion and obstruction of vision in approximately 10 percent of the affected cases.
Corticosteroids like dexamethasone and prednisone have been used since the 1960s for treating Problematic hemangiomas but they may fail at times. Moreover, their action mechanism against hemangioma has remained a mystery.
From Sciencedaily.com:
Greenberger, Bischoff and colleagues worked with hemangioma stem cells isolated from patient tissue samples provided by Mulliken, and showed that:
* When human hemangioma stem cells were pretreated with dexamethasone, then implanted in mice, the tumors that formed had far fewer blood vessels.
* Dexamethasone suppressed the stem cells’ production of VEGF-A, but did not suppress VEGF-A production by endothelial cells from the same hemangioma.
* When VEGF-A production was suppressed in hemangioma stem cells using shRNA silencing, then implanted in the mice, there was an 89 percent reduction in vessel growth.
* VEGF-A was detected in actively growing hemangiomas, but not in regressing (involuting) hemangiomas.
Earlier research in Bischoff’s lab and that of Bjorn Olsen, MD, PhD, of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, indicates that hemangiomas may result from an in utero mutation in a stem cell destined to become an endothelial cell, causing a disruption in the normally well-ordered process of blood vessel development. Under a 2008 Translational Research Program grant from Children’s, Bischoff’s lab has been using hemangioma stem cells to test a library of existing medications that might specifically inhibit the proliferation of the hemangioma stem cells, and thereby limit growth of the hemangioma tumor.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Translational Research Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, a Harvard Skin Diseases Pilot Study Grant, Sheba Medical Center (Israel), and the John Butler Mulliken Foundation.
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