Decoding fibrosis in the human central nervous system

Abstract

Recent advancements in human tissue analyses and animal models have revealed that fibrotic scarring is a common response to various lesions in the central nervous system (CNS). Perivascular cells within the brain or spinal cord give rise to stromal fibroblasts that form fibrotic scar tissue. In this review, we summarize the current understanding of fibrotic scar formation in different CNS lesions and evaluate published human single-cell gene expression datasets to gather information on perivascular cells. Specifically, we highlight the classification of pericytes and fibroblast subtypes and compare the marker expression of perivascular cells across different datasets.

Keywords: central nervous system; fibrosis; perivascular cells; scarring; single cell transcriptomics.