Marcos López Hoyos
Scientific Director of the Valdecilla Health Research Institute (IDIVAL), Head of the Immunology Department, and Professor of Immunology at the University of Cantabria-Marqués de Valdecilla University Hospital
This work advances the search for tolerogenic mechanisms to avoid the use of long-term immunosuppression in solid organ transplantation.
It is a unique model and difficult to transfer for now to humans, since joint kidney-heart transplants have not demonstrated the findings obtained here with primates, probably because in humans a level of immunosuppression is used that does not allow for the possible cellular chimerism that the authors claim could be responsible for tolerance.
The paper does not find a clear mechanism that induces it, although it suggests a possible increase of regulatory T cells in lymphoid organs in the kidney itself. There is no change in circulating lymphocytes in the blood and no gene expression to suggest such a mechanism. They do show an absence of antibodies and effector T cells alloreactive against the transplanted organ.
This is interesting work in the search for mechanisms to induce immunological tolerance to avoid the use of long-term immunosuppression.