Sometimes the biggest challenge for transplant patients just after receiving a new organ, when their bodies can reject as foreign. Now, scientists report in advance online edition of this week of Nature Immunology an immune cell that may be able to call out the immune system to launch such an attack. Although the work is still years from the clinic, it reinforces the idea that there may be ways to hide the strangeness of a new body.
Transplant patients today rely on powerful immunosuppressive drugs to keep rejection at bay. But these drugs can have serious side effects. Better treatment, scientists say, would encourage less of an immune response to a transplant recipient to start, rather than suppressing the response once it is already there.
immunologist Nicole Suciu-Foca and colleagues at Columbia University in New York stumbled on a possible approach while studying the biology of autoimmune diseases. The group was to mix two types of immune cells of two people: the dendritic cells, which the immune system warning invaders of a person, and T cells that fight the other. Normally, dendritic cells by adding to the mix should induce T cells to multiply to attack a threat. But in this case, the reverse is produced :. Dendritic cells Adding actually slowed the growth of T cells
T cell growth was inhibited only when both genes, ILT3 and ILT4 , were activated in the dendritic cells. Scientists believe that the so-called suppressor T cells turned on genes, because when they removed these cell culture, the growth of T cells resumes. This natural immune suppression may occur in cardiac transplant recipients who never rejected the organ, researchers say; T suppressor cells of these patients could induce dendritic cells from the donor to produce ILT3 and ILT4. This was not the case among those who rejected their new heart.
The work is "good news" for those trying to stem the immune rejection of grafts, said immunologist Mark Weinberg Emory University of Medicine School in Atlanta, Georgia. But, he adds, clinical intervention is still far.
Related Sites
The homepage of Nicole Suciu-Foca
transplant programs at Columbia University
American Society of Transplantation
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