Detailseite
Projekt Druckansicht

Basophils as modulators of humoral and cellular allo-immune responses

Fachliche Zuordnung Allgemein- und Viszeralchirurgie
Förderung Förderung von 2010 bis 2017
Projektkennung Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 160225957
 
Erstellungsjahr 2018

Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse

We have proposed to address two main questions during the funding period. First, to analyse the role of basophils for chronic allograft rejection and second to analyse the contribution of hematopoietic collagen-producing cells, called fibrocytes, to allograft fibrosis. By depletion of basophils and the use of IL-4 deficient mice we could demonstrate for the first time an essential role of basophils for development of graft fibrosis as recently published in the Am. J. Transplant. Our experiments revealed that basophil-derived IL-4 is a main profibrotic factor in experimental heart transplantation. To address the second question (contribution of fibrocytes) we generated conditional collagen-1 deficient mice and crossed these mice with specific Cre-deleter mice. This process was time consuming and resulted in sufficient numbers of well characterized mice only during the last year of the funding period. Nevertheless, we were able to perform the suggested key experiments with the cell-type specific knock-out mice and could also successfully deplete fibrocytes with anti-GR1 antibodies as proposed. With these experiments we could demonstrate that apart from resident mesenchymal fibroblasts also infiltrating cells of hematopoietic origin (fibrocytes) significantly contribute to allograft fibrosis. We plan to continue transplant research in our group on the basis of a DFG-Sachbeihilfe to address the question how basophils are recruited into the transplants and how they are activated locally. In addition, we envisage to use a fibrosis model with cyclosporin A that we could establish during the funding period. So far all experiments were performed in a model of chronic transplant rejection with antibody-mediated depletion of CD4+ T cells to prevent acute rejection. As CD4+ T cells are an alternative source of IL-4, it will be important to find out, whether basophils and basophil-derived IL-4 will still be essential if immunosuppression is performed with cyclosporine A.

Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)

 
 

Zusatzinformationen

Textvergrößerung und Kontrastanpassung