Mitomycin C-treated dendritic cells inactivate autoreactive T cells: Toward the development of a tolerogenic vaccine in autoimmune diseases

作者：Terness Peter^*; Oelert Thilo; Ehser Sandra; Chuang Jing Jing; Lahdou Imad; Kleist Christian; Velten Florian; Haemmerling Gnter J; Arnold Bernd; Opelz Gerhard

来源：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008, 105(47): 18442-18447.

DOI：10.1073/pnas.0807185105

• immunological tolerance
• multiple sclerosis
• immunosuppressive therapy

Treatment of autoimmune diseases remains a challenge for immunological research. An ideal therapy should inhibit the immune reaction against the diseased organ and leave the rest of the immune response intact. Our previous studies showed that donor-derived dendritic cells (DCs) treated in vitro with mitomycin C (MMC) suppress rat heart allograft rejection if injected into recipients before transplantation. Here we analyze their efficacy in controlling autoimmunity. MMC-DCs loaded with myelin-basic-protein (MBP) inhibited specific T cells derived from multiple sclerosis patients in vitro. if coincubated with MMC-DCs, T cells were arrested in the G(0)/G(1) cell cycle phase. Microarray gene scan showed that MMC influences the expression of 116 genes in DCs, one main cluster comprising apoptotic and the second cluster immunosuppressive genes. Apparently, the combination of apoptosis with expression of tolerogenic molecules renders MMC-DCs suppressive. MBP-loaded MMC-DCs also inhibited mouse T cells in vitro and, in contrast to MBP-loaded naive DCs, did not induce experimental autoimmune encephalitis. Most importantly, mice vaccinated with inhibitory DCs became resistant to the disease. Whereas this is not the first report on generation of suppressive DCs, it delineates a method using a clinically approved drug at nontoxic concentrations, which yields irreversibly changed DCs, effective across species in vitro and in vivo.

• 出版日期2008-11-25