Category: Immunology (6)
Fetal cells home to injured mother tissue
The current accepted method of using cord blood is for post myeloablative hematopoietic reconstitution in patients with leukemias, or other hematological/metabolic disorders. Essentially the idea is that if you destroy the resident stem cells and administer "healthy" stem cells, then the progeny of the healthy stem cells will act in a dominant manner to reverse the disease. Many clinicians...
Ex vivo expanded Treg cells protection against allograft rejection
Chicago, IL, USA - Understanding methods of manipulating the immune system to accept allogeneic grafts without the continued need for immune suppression would not only solve the problem of organ transplant rejection but would also bring stem cell therapy (especially embryonic) closer to reality. One interesting method of bringing about such an "immunological...
GM-CSF protecting diabetes
Sherbrooke, Quebec - The immune suppressive activity of mesenchymal and hematopoietic stem cells is well known. An interesting question however is whether activation/mobilization of these cells with pharmacological agents can be used to induce systemic immune modulation...
Infectious Antigen Specific Tolerance by Dendritic Cells
Wuhan, China - The possibility of T regulatory cells inducing tolerance, both antigen specifically, and antigen-nonspecifically through the modulation of antigen presenting cell function has been previously established. What is more interesting is the concept of an antigen presenting cell being able to transfer tolerance without the...
Treg cells causing "alternative activation" of monocytes
London, UK - In immunology, the notion that T cells are activated by antigen presenting cells has been around for decades. At one time, it was believed that T cells are activated by "immune RNA" generated from antigen presenting cells, this immune RNA being able to "instruct" the T cell to go after specific antigens. Afterwards, the major...
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PSGL-1 and generation of tolerogenic dendritic cells
Madrid, Spain - The advancement of allogeneic stem cell research into the clinic has always been dependent on immunology. In other words, allogeneic stem cell therapy is dependent on ability of the clinician to manipulate the recipient immune system so that the allogeneic cells do not get rejected (host versus graft), nor that the recipient gets attacked by the cells administered (graft...