“…The differentially upregulated genes in List I were functionally linked to: i) a chemokine/cytokine response, since these molecules have effectively been implicated in several aspects of MM biology (myeloma cell proliferation and survival, homing and/or drug resistance, angiogenesis, OC precursor recruitment and bone destruction) [1, 2, 28]; ii) an immune and inflammatory response, which could be related to the reported diminished immunomodulatory potential of pMSCs [18]; iii) angiogenesis (e. g. ANGPTL4, FGF2 ) [13, 31]; iv) microenvironment cross-talk, including cell-matrix adhesion (e. g. COL12A1 , ITGB1 ) or integrin-mediated and extracellular matrix remodelation (e. g. ITGA2, ITGAM , VCAM1, MMP1 , MMP3 , MMP9 , MMP12 ) [3, 45, 46]; and v) bone biology and skeletal development [(e. g. SPP1 (osteopontin) [47]]. Manual curation based on the literature, further revealed functions of these deregulated genes related to myeloma growth and drug resistance (e. g. IL6 , CCL3 , HGF , FN1 ) [3, 20, 48], OC formation and/or activation (e. g. CCL3 , CCL20, LIF ) [26, 48, 49] and inhibition of OB differentiation and function (e. g. CCL3 , EREG ) [50, 51].…”