 Welcome to the OncoTarget YouTube channel. This week I'll be introducing you to Dr. Raz. She works with the Department of Orthopedics at Lieden University Medical Center in Lieden, Netherlands. Please enjoy. Hello, I'm Vera Raz from Leiden University Medical Center and next to me sits my colleague Jan Ferdin and Hanselor from the Orthopedics. And together we would like to discuss with you our paper on OncoTarget entitled Molecular Signatures of Age-Associated Chronic Degeneration of Shoulder Muscles from February 2016 issue. Yeah, shoulder complaints are very prevalent in the general population about above the age 60, about 40% of the general population will develop a rotator cuff tear and around half the people that watch this video will eventually in their life develop a rotator cuff tear. Rotator cuff tearing leads to pain and impaired function of the shoulder and this in turn will lead to disability during daily activities. There are several clinical options but the most prevalent one is surgery for rotator cuff repair. However, the success rate of these type of surgery drops significantly with an elder population and currently we don't understand the cause of tearing and how we can treat this disease effectively. Right, and then therefore we decided here in Leiden University Medical Center that we will try to understand the molecular regulators of the disease. We hypothesize that if we understand molecularly what's going on in the tissue, we will be able to develop a better diagnostic and better therapy. We're not there yet but in the paper that we published, we made the first step towards it. What we did, we collected two tissues from each patient that went a surgery here in Leiden University Medical Center. We collected healthy tissue and we compared the molecular changes between the healthy and the degenerated tissues. And we did it on three levels. We looked at radiological features using MRIs that were done for each patient. We did histological staining on the tissues and we did RNA sequencing from cell cultures that we generated from the tissues. And we did that because we saw that histologically the tissue in the degenerated tissue, the condition of the tissue in the degenerated state is very, very damaged, which means that if we do RNA check directly, we will see a lot of secondary factors that are less interesting for in also diagnosis. What we found, we found that actually the cells that we can generate from the healthy and the degenerated tissues are highly similar. We didn't see any differences in cell death and cell division also in cell senescence. They were quite similar. There were some differences in mitochondrial activity, but not significant. The most significant difference we found was in the capacity of cells to fuse what we call myogenesis. This we also found back when we did the RNA sex, the most genes that were affected by the condition were clustered into muscle development, into muscle development, but also into the extracellular metrics that we know is often highly affected in degenerated muscles. So the conclusion of that study that the most important that we can find molecular differences between the intact and the degenerated tissue that means that we can in the future probably offer molecular diagnostic for the disease. This needs to be developed. We also were able to correct some of the myogenic features of the degenerated cells by adding one of the genes that was expressed. That means that in the future we might be able to develop a therapeutical options for the rotator cuff disease. To summary, this study represents an initial step and in future studies we want to develop a molecular diagnostics for rotator cuff tearing for a more accurate diagnostics, what's going on, and eventually to, of course, to enhance our treatment results and we aim for a better tissue regeneration after a rotator cuff repair. Now, for, no, for, if you want to know more, you can always contact us or you can read our paper at the OncoTarget website. By clicking the link below, you can learn more about the research, discuss, and interview from the cover paper of volume seven issue eight. Thank you for watching.