Autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation reduces abnormalities in the expression of immune genes in multiple sclerosis

Autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (AHSCT) has been experimented as a treatment in patients affected by severe forms of multiple sclerosis (MS) who failed to respond to standard immunotherapy. The rationale of AHSCT is to "reboot" the immune system and reconstitute a new adaptive immunity. The aim of our study was to identify through a robust and unbiased transcriptomic analysis any changes of gene expression in T cells potentially underlying the treatment effect in patients who underwent non-myeloablative AHSCT for treatment of MS. We evaluated by microarray DNA-chip technology the gene expression of peripheral CD4+ and CD8+ T cell subsets sorted from patients with MS patients before AHSCT, at 6 months, 1 year and 2 years after AHSCT and from healthy control subjects. Hierarchical clustering analysis revealed that reconstituted CD8+ T cells of MS patients at 2 years post-transplantation aggregated together with healthy controls, suggesting a normalization of gene expression in CD8+ cells post-therapy. When we compared the gene expression in MS patients before and after therapy we detected a large number of differentially expressed genes (DEG) in both CD8+ and CD4+ T cell subsets at all time-points after transplantation. We catalogued the biological function of DEG and we selected 27 genes known to be involved in immune function for accurate quantification of gene expression by real-time PCR. The analysis confirmed a...
Source: Clinical Science - Category: Biomedical Science Authors: Source Type: research