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From the * Department of Medicine, Boston University Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts
02118; The involvement of chemokines in inflammation is well established, but their functional role
in disease progression, and particularly in the development of fibrosis, is not yet understood. To
investigate the functional role that the chemokines monocyte chemoattractant protein-1
(MCP-1) and RANTES play in inflammation and the progression to fibrosis during crescentic
nephritis we have developed and characterized a murine model for this syndrome. Significant
increases in T-lymphocytes and macrophages were observed within glomeruli and interstitium,
paralleled by an induction of mRNA expression of MCP-1 and RANTES, early after disease
initiation. Blocking the function of MCP-1 or RANTES resulted in significant decreases in
proteinuria as well as in numbers of infiltrating leukocytes, indicating that both MCP-1 and
RANTES (regulated upon activation in normal T cells expressed and secreted) play an important role in the inflammatory phase of crescentic nephritis. In addition, neutralization of MCP-1
resulted in a dramatic decrease in both glomerular crescent formation and deposition of type I
collagen. These results highlight a novel role for MCP-1 in crescent formation and development of interstitial fibrosis, and indicate that in addition to recruiting inflammatory cells this
chemokine is critically involved in irreversible tissue damage.
The Center for Blood Research, Incorporated and Department of Genetics and the § Department of Pathology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115;
Glaxo Institute
for Molecular Biology, Geneva, CH1228 Switzerland; and ¶ Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc.,
Cambridge Massachusets 02139
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