Regulatory immunotherapy in bone marrow transplantation

Vanessa Morales-Tirado1, Wioleta Luszczek, Marié van der Merwe

  • 1Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, 262 Danny Thomas Place, Memphis, TN 38105, USA.

Thescientificworldjournal
|January 21, 2012
PubMed

Every year individuals receive hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) to eradicate malignant and nonmalignant disease. The immunobiology of allotransplantation is an area of ongoing discovery, from the recipient's conditioning treatment prior to the transplant to the donor cell populations responsible for engraftment, graft-versus-host disease, and graft-versus-tumor effect. In this review, we focus on donor-type immunoregulatory T cells, namely, natural killer T cells (NKT) and regulatory T cells (Treg), and their current and potential roles in tolerance induction after allogeneic HSCT.