Immune Phenotypes of Circulating Endothelial Progenitor Cells: A Biomarker of Cardiovascular Disease?

Endothelial Progenitor Cells (EPCs) are recognized a circulating pool of primitive endothelial precursors of different origin from bone marrow or peripheral tissues, which express on their surface endothelial markers, i.e. CD45-, CD34+, CD144+, CD309 etc. There are at least two types of EPCs: early outgrowth EPCs and late outgrowth EPCs, which distinguish each other their structure, function, expression of CD markers and gene expression. Whether various immune phenotypes of circulating EPCs may play similar role in endothelial homeostasis acting as endogenous repair system is not fully understand. However, both immune phenotype EPCs are involved in the pathogenesis of CV diseases across all stages of CV continuum. The short commentary is depicted the possibility to use a dysfunction of different EPCs as a predictive biomarker of CV disease development with promising discriminative value to relate to CV clinical outcomes.