No Monkey Business: Successful Eye Stem Cell Transplant In Monkeys

Under certain conditions, transplanted stem cells from one monkey to another survived without rejection for at least six months.

AsianScientist (Sep. 19, 2016) – Researchers in Japan have successfully transplanted retinal pigment cells derived from the stem cells of one monkey into the eyes of other monkeys without rejection, and without the need for immunosuppressant drugs. The study was published in Stem Cell Reports.

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology are currently attempting a clinical trial of stem cell transplants in people with age-related macular degeneration, an eye disease that causes vision loss with age. In order to avoid tissue rejection, they used induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that were created from the recipient’s own skin cells—a costly and tedious process.

First author Dr. Sunao Sugita from RIKEN said, “In order to make iPSC transplantation a practical reality, the current goal is to create banks of iPSC-derived tissues that can be transplanted into anyone as they are needed. However, immune responses and tissue rejection are big issues to overcome when transplanting tissue derived from other individuals.”

The present study, also carried out by researchers at RIKEN, shows that this procedure is possible as long as a set of cells called major histocompatibility complexes (MHCs) are genetically matched between the host animal and the new retinal cells. MHCs are a set of cell-surface proteins that function in the immune system and is found in all cells.

To test whether MHC matching is a viable method, the team used retinal pigment cells that were grown from monkey iPSCs in the iPS cell bank and transplanted the cells into the subretinal space in monkeys with either genetically matched or non-matched MHCs.

The researchers found that these transplanted cells survived without rejection for at least six months in MHC-matched monkeys, without using any of the usually necessary immunosuppressant drugs. In contrast, rejection was relatively quick in the MHC-mismatched monkeys. Furthermore, the researchers found that infiltration by inflammatory cells was only present in the transplanted grafts of the MHC-mismatched monkeys.


The article can be found at: Sugita et al. (2016) Successful Transplantation of Retinal Pigment Epithelial Cells from MHC Homozygote iPSCs in MHC-matched Models.

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Source: RIKEN; Photo: Pixabay.
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