New advances in achieving hematopoietic chimerism may facilitate immunological tolerance to kidney transplants. In 1953, Billingham et al. reported the Nobel Prize-winning finding that neonatal inoculation of mice with allogeneic lymphoid cells could induce long-lived donor hematopoietic chimerism and that the resulting intermingling of donor and host immune cells throughout the host yielded immunological tolerance to donor-strain grafts (1). This discovery brought with it the promise of organ transplantation without the morbidity of lifelong immunosuppression and set routine attainment of immunological tolerance as the field's seemingly unreachable Holy Grail. Now, Leventhal et al. (2) add to advances in the last few years that suggest that the 6-decade-long quest for tolerance for kidney transplant patients may finally be nearing its end.
展开▼
