Marcos López Hoyos
Scientific Director of the Valdecilla Health Research Institute (IDIVAL) and Professor of Immunology at the University of Cantabria
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.