Suppression of graft-versus-host disease by naturally occurring regulatory T cells

Defu Zeng1, Fengshuo Lan, Petra Hoffmann

  • 1Division of Rheumatology and Immunology, Department of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.

Transplantation
|January 17, 2004
PubMed

Studies of graft-versus-host disease after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation have shown that there are subsets of freshly isolated donor T cells that induce the disease and subsets that suppress the disease. The balance of subsets in the graft determines disease severity. The authors' work on the nature of the regulatory-suppressor T cells and their mechanisms of action is summarized in this article.