Charakterisierung nichtdendritischer monozytärer Zellen mit immunregulatorischen Eigenschaften

The concept of actively acquired immune tolerance was first shown by the group of Medawar in 1953. Over the past few years, many new insights in the process of immune regulation have been gained. In 1995, Sakaguchi and colleagues described a CD4+CD25+ T-cell with immuneregulatory function. This was followed by the discovery of many other cell types with regulatory function of lymphocytic and dendritic origin. In the following we present an immuneregulatory cell of human monocytic origin. Although these cells share some characteristics with dendritic cells (DC), they are phenotypi-cally different from recently described regulatory DCs. They are CD14+, CD80+, CD86+ but BDCA2- and CD83-. In addition, immuneregulatory markers Foxp3 and CTLA-4 are expressed. In previous studies injection of these cells prevented allograft rejection for more than 100 days after allogeneic kidney transplantation in rats. Therefore we named these cells transplantat-acceptance-inducing cells (TAIC).