Background: In an effort to define reliable assays that might predict postimmunosuppressant-withdrawal development of chronic rejection (CR), despite conditioning for tolerance induction, we evaluated various immunological responses in nonhuman primate renal allograft recipients.
Methods: Fourteen Cynomolgus monkeys received low dose total body irradiation, thymic irradiation, antithymocyte globulin, and peritransplant CD154 blockade, followed by a one-month course of cyclosporine. Recipients underwent major histocompatibility complex mismatched kidney transplantation with donor bone marrow infusion (Group A, n=8), without donor cell infusion (Group B, n=2), or with donor splenocyte infusion (Group C, n=4).
Results: All Group A recipients developed mixed chimerism and four of them survived long-term without rejection. The remaining four rejected their kidney allografts either chronically or acutely. All recipients in Groups B and C failed to develop chimerism and rejected their allografts. Among various in vitro assays, detection of anti-donor alloantibody (ADA) by flow cytometry (FCM) was the most relevant to long-term outcome. All five recipients that developed both anti-T cell and B cell IgG ADA in Groups A, B and C, developed histological evidence of CR within 200 days of the appearance of ADA. One of two recipients that developed only anti-B cell IgG ADA eventually developed CR over two years following discontinuation of immunosuppression and 1.5 years after ADA development. Another recipient with very low anti-B cell ADA has never developed CR.
Conclusion: ADA monitoring with FCM assay appears to be useful in predicting the failure of tolerance prior to the development of functional or histologic abnormalities of the renal allograft.