Monocytes stimulate fibroblastoid bone marrow stromal cells to produce multilineage hematopoietic growth factors.

In previous studies we have found that monocytes produce soluble factors that stimulate human umbilical vein endothelial cells to produce granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating activity (CSA), burst-promoting activity (BPA), and megakaryocyte colony-stimulating activity (Meg-CSA) as well as factors that stimulate T lymphocytes and neonatal fibroblasts to produce CSA. To test the hypothesis that monocytes would similarly stimulate the production of hematopoietic growth factors by autologous bone marrow stromal cells, multiply-passaged adherent fibroblastoid cells derived from the bone marrow of normal volunteers were exposed to conditioned media prepared by incubating autologous peripheral blood monocytes in complete medium for three days. When conditioned media from stromal cells incubated in monocyte-conditioned medium were compared with those of stromal cells cultured in the absence of monocyte-conditioned medium, BPA was increased fourfold and CSA was increased more than 30-fold. We conclude that mononuclear phagocytes recruit stromal cells of the marrow to produce multilineage growth factors in vitro. We suggest that these monocyte-derived recruiting activities may play an important role in orchestration of hematopoietic growth factor production by cells of the marrow microenvironment.