A researcher at the University of Florida has received a three-year, $300,000 grant from the Lupus Research Institute to study this phenomenon using new modeling technology. She hopes to use this technology, which recreates bone marrow in a three-dimensional model, to determine why these cells are dying.

Bone marrow should be a cell factory where adult supporting stem cells, called mesenchymal stem cells, help regulate the formation of blood cells. In the pockets, or niches, of bone marrow are these mesenchymal stem cells as well as other types of cells, including hematopoietic stem cells that can develop into red blood cells and other blood cells.

But in patients with the autoimmune disease lupus, this process has gone awry. Their bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells are dying, severely affecting the normal development of hematopoietic cells into mature blood cells. This can result in anemia, low platelet counts and other blood disorders.

"Without healthy niches, the bone marrow cannot make normal blood components," said Lijun Yang, M.D., an associate professor of hematopathology in the UF College of Medicine. "When you stain lupus patients' bone marrow for dead cells, it is dramatic. In contrast to normal people, most lupus patients' bone marrows are full of dead cells. Twenty, 30, 50 percent of their cells are dead."