Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 17|pp 16887—16898

Celastrol regulates bone marrow mesenchymal stem cell fate and bone-fat balance in osteoporosis and skeletal aging by inducing PGC-1α signaling

Li Li¹, Bing Wang¹, Yawei Li¹, Lei Li¹, Yuliang Dai¹, Guohua Lv¹, Pengfei Wu², Pengzhi Li¹

¹Department of Spine Surgery, The Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha 410011, Hunan, China
²Center for Medical Genetics, School of Life Sciences, Central South University, Changsha 410011, Hunan, China

Received: August 18, 2019Accepted: June 13, 2020Published: July 28, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Celastrol has recently been identified as a prospective new treatment for obesity and several metabolic complications. However, the effect of Celastrol in osteoporosis (OP) remains unknown. In this study, we demonstrated that Celastrol promotes osteoblast differentiation and prevents adipocyte differentiation in bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs) in vitro. Mechanistically, Celastrol was able to control the differentiation of BM-MSCs by stimulating PGC-1α signaling. Moreover, administration of Celastrol could alleviate bone loss and bone marrow adipose tissue (MAT) accumulation in ovariectomized (OVX) mice and aged mice. Together, these results recommended that Celastrol could regulate BM-MSCs fate and bone-fat balance in OP and skeletal aging by stimulating PGC-1α, which might act as a possible therapeutic target for OP and for the prevention of skeletal aging.