Thymus and tolerance in transplantation
| Autor: | Richard L. Boyd, Jason William Gill, Daniel Herbert Donald Gray, Alan O Trounson |
|---|---|
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Monash University Handbook of Stem Cells ISBN: 9780124366435 Handbook of Stem Cells |
| Popis: | This chapter examines how the thymus imposes tolerance and proposes novel ways through which it may be manipulated to achieve acceptance of stem cell transplants. Stem cell-based research is a highly complex, rapidly evolving technology that offers the ultimate horizon in clinical therapy—the physical replacement of damaged or missing cells and tissues. Although such “cell-based” therapies are of unquestionable potential importance, unless they are of autologous origin, any transplantation of such cells will meet the fate of immune rejection. This fundamentally involves an active thymus to generate T-cells and to purge the evolving pool of “self-reactive” cells. The transplantation of autologous stem cells could theoretically circumvent these problems. The crucial role of thymus in tolerance induction makes it an obvious target for the induction of transplantation tolerance. Although the establishment of donor–host hematopoietic chimerism can lead to lifelong tolerance to alloantigens, thymic involution in adults presents a technical problem to this approach. The ability to reproducibly direct the differentiation of cell lines towards immune stem cell lineages, in addition to therapeutic tissues, will allow testing of such strategies for the induction of immune tolerance to stem cell transplants |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|