Mesenchymal stem cells in autoimmune diseases: hype or hope?
1 Department of Rheumatology, Leiden University Medical Center, Albinusdreef 2, 2300 RC Leiden, The Netherlands
2 Department of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology, Charité-University Medicine Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, Germany
3 Department of Immunohematology and Blood Transfusion, Leiden University Medical Center, Albinusdreef 2, 2300 RC Leiden, The Netherlands
Arthritis Research & Therapy 2010, 12:126 doi:10.1186/ar3036
See related research by Schurgers et al., http://arthritis-research.com/content/12/1/R31
Published: 18 June 2010Abstract
Intervention with mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) represents a promising therapeutic tool in treatment-refractory autoimmune diseases. A new report by Schurgers and colleagues in a previous issue of Arthritis Research & Therapy sheds novel mechanistic insight into the pathways employed by MSCs to suppress T-cell proliferation in vitro, but, at the same time, indicates that MSCs do not influence T-cell reactivity and the disease course in an in vivo arthritis model. Such discrepancies between the in vitro and in vivo effects of potent cellular immune modulators should spark further research and should be interpreted as a sign of caution for the in vitro design of MSC-derived interventions in the setting of human autoimmune diseases.
