Superiority of Rapamycin Over Tacrolimus in Preserving Nonhuman Primate Treg Half‐Life and Phenotype After Adoptive Transfer

Many critical issues remain concerning how best to deploy adoptive regulatory T cell (Treg) immunotherapy to the clinic. These include a determination of their pharmacokinetic characteristics, their optimal dose, their phenotypic stability and the best therapies with which to pair Tregs. By performing a CFSE‐labeled autologous Treg pulse experiment, we determined that the accessible peripheral blood Treg pool in rhesus macaques is quite large (75 ± 11 × 106 Tregs/kg). Pharmacokinetic analysis revealed that Tregs have two phases of elimination: an α phase, with a T1/2 in the peripheral blood of 32.4 ± 11.3 h and a β phase with a T1/2 of 120.4 ± 19.7 h. In addition to their short initial half‐life, Tregs underwent rapid phenotypic shifts after infusion, with significant loss of both CD25 and FoxP3 by day +6. While tacrolimus stabilized CD25 expression, it did not improve T1/2, nor mitigate the loss of FoxP3. In contrast, rapamycin significantly stabilized both CD25 and FoxP3, and supported an increased half‐life, with an α phase of 67.7 ± 6.9 h and a β phase of 252.1 ± 54.9 h. These results suggest that rapamycin may be a necessary addition to Treg immunotherapy, and that tacrolimus may be deleterious to Treg integrity posttransfer.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  American Journal of Transplantation

• Publication date

  2014-12-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/ajt.12934PMID 25359003PMCID PMC4236286
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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