In vitro differentiation of macrophages from peripheral blood cells of celiac patients.

Macrophages have both a protective and pathological role in many autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Macrophages phenotype is regulated by the environment that affects their polarization toward a pro- or anti-inflammatory phenotype. We describe a protocol for in vitro differentiation of macrophages from blood peripheral monocytes, that may be adopted to study different pathologies. Here, we are interested to study the phenotype of macrophages differentiated from patients affected by acute celiac disease (CD) or subjects following a gluten free diet (GFD), after in vitro gliadin challenge. We assess the pro-inflammatory phenotype of these macrophages by cytokines quantization on the cell supernatant. Moreover, our proposed protocol allows the preparation of total RNA to analyze the expression profile of many genes.