Blood, 1 September 2002, Vol. 100, No. 5, pp. 1886-1893
TRANSPLANTATION
Mixed peripheral blood stem cell transplantation for autoimmune
disease in BXSB/MpJ mice
Yoshihisa Yamamoto,
Bingyan Wang,
Shirou Fukuhara,
Susumu Ikehara, and
Robert A. Good
From the Department of Pediatrics, University of South
Florida, All Children's Hospital, St Petersburg, FL; and the First
Department of Internal Medicine and First Department of Pathology,
Kansai Medical University, Osaka, Japan.
We examined whether mixed allogeneic transplantation with syngeneic
plus allogeneic peripheral blood stem cells (PBSCs) is sufficient to
interrupt autoimmune processes in BXSB mice and confer a potential
therapeutic option for the treatment of patients with autoimmune
diseases. Eight-week-old BXSB mice were lethally irradiated and
reconstituted with BALB/c (H-2d)+BXSB (H-2b)
PBSCs, in which the number of injected allogeneic progenitor cells was
5 times that of syngeneic progenitor cells. The survival of mixed PBSC
chimeras (BALB/c+BXSB
BXSB) was 80% at the age of 48 weeks, whereas that of full chimeras (BALB/c
BXSB) was 90%. Mixed
PBSC transplantation (PBSCT) prevented the production of anti-DNA
antibodies and the development of lupus nephritis in BXSB recipients
and induced tolerance to both allogeneic and syngeneic antigens.
Moreover, mixed chimeras exhibited immunological functions superior to
fully allogeneic chimeras. On the other hand, increases in the
number of BXSB PBSCs resulted in the transfer of lupus nephritis in
BXSB+BALB/c
BALB/c mice. Thus, the number of hematopoietic progenitor cells from normal mice proved critical to the prevention of
autoimmune diseases. We propose that mixed allogeneic PBSCT for the
interruption of the autoimmune process can be carried out by injecting
increased numbers of allogeneic normal hematopoietic progenitor cells
to prevent the relapse of autoimmune diseases, although it is necessary
to decide upon a minimum dose of syngeneic PBSCs to achieve the desired
beneficial effects on autoimmunity.