Vasoactive intestinal peptide-deficient mice exhibit reduced pathology in trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid-induced colitis.

OBJECTIVES: Vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) is an immunomodulatory neuropeptide with therapeutic properties in multiple murine models of inflammatory disease including the trinitrobenzene-sulfonic acid (TNBS)-colitis model of Crohn's disease. Understanding the spectrum of biological actions of endogenously produced VIP may help us dissect the complex and multifactorial pathogenesis of such inflammatory diseases. Our goal was to determine the contribution of endogenously produced VIP to TNBS-colitis by using VIP knockout (KO) mice.
METHODS: TNBS was intracolonically administered to wild-type (WT) and VIP KO mice, and weight loss and colitis were assessed over time. Colon histopathological changes and myeloperoxidase activities were analyzed and the levels of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α and interleukin (IL)-6 in colon and serum quantified. The proliferative response in vitro of splenocytes from TNBS WT and VIP KO administered mice to anti-CD3 and anti-CD28 was determined.
RESULTS: VIP KO mice did not exhibit the predicted exacerbated response to TNBS. Instead, they developed a milder clinical profile than WT mice, with lower TNF-α and IL-6 levels. Such potential defects seem selective, because other parameters such as the histopathological scores and the cytokine levels in the colon did not differ between the two strains of mice. Moreover, splenocytes from TNBS-treated VIP KO mice exhibited an enhanced proliferative response to anti-CD3/CD28 stimulation in vitro.
CONCLUSION: Chronic loss of VIP in mice leads to a disruption of certain but not all immunological compartments, corroborating recent findings that VIP KO mice exhibit reduced mortality in the lipopolysaccharide-induced endotoxemia model and attenuated clinical development of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis while developing robust T-cell responses.