Tolerant and rejecting T cell microarray

anti-CD4, CD8 and CD40L treated versus control murine CD4+ T cells from micegrafted with hESC derived xenografts. Human embryonic stem cells (ESCs), by virtue of their capability to self-renew and differentiate into almost all body cell types, represent the first type of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) to be used in clinical transplantation to humans in recent phase-I trials. As it is unlikely that any such cells or their progeny will survive in an allogeneic host, there is an urgent need to understand how to get long-term acceptance and functional differentiation with minimal immunosuppression. Here, we show that brief induction with combined monoclonal antibody-mediated coreceptor and costimulation blockade enables long-term survival and engraftment of murine ESCs, human ESCs, human induced PSCs, and human ESC-derived progenitor cells from all three embryonic germ layers. Tolerance induced to PSC-derived progenitors appears, remarkably, to extend to protection of their differentiated progenies, and sometimes even to different tissues derived from the same donor, suggesting linked-suppression as a likely operative mechanism. These results suggest that once tolerance has been established to PSC-derived progenitor cells, it can be extended to their differentiated progenies. Global gene expression profiling of graft infiltrating T-lymphocytes identifies gene sets that differ between rejecting and tolerant populations including gene upregulation in pathways associated with apoptosis, cell adhesion, transcription suppression and TGF synthesis; and gene downregulation in pathways associated with inflammation in recipients treated with combined coreceptor and costimulation blockade. Mice grafted with hESC derived tissues and untreated (control) or tolerised via injections of anti-CD4, anti CD8 and CD40L. CD3+ T cells isolated from the gratfs 30 days later.