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The Innate NK Cells, Allograft Rejection, and a Key Role for IL-15¹

Alexander Kroemer^*, Xiang Xiao^*, Nicolas Degauque^*, Karoline Edtinger^*, Haiming Wei, Gulcin Demirci^* and Xian Chang Li^2,*

^* Harvard Medical School, Transplant Research Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA 02115; and University of Science and Technology of China, School of Life Sciences, Hefei, China

Transplant rejection is mediated primarily by adaptive immune cells such as T cells and B cells. The T and B cells are also responsible for the specificity and memory of the rejection response. However, destruction of allografts involves many other cell types including cells in the innate immune system. As the innate immune cells do not express germline-encoded cell surface receptors that directly recognize foreign Ags, these cells are thought to be recruited by T cells to participate in the rejection response. In this study, we examined the alloreactivity of the innate NK cells in Rag^–/– mice using a stringent skin transplant model and found that NK cells at a resting state readily reject allogeneic cells, but not the skin allografts. We also found that IL-15, when preconjugated to its high affinity IL-15R-chain, is remarkably potent in stimulating NK cells in vivo, and NK cells stimulated by IL-15 express an activated phenotype and are surprisingly potent in mediating acute skin allograft rejection in the absence of any adaptive immune cells. Furthermore, NK cell-mediated graft rejection does not show features of memory responses. Our data demonstrate that NK cells are potent alloreactive cells when fully activated and differentiated under certain conditions. This finding may have important clinical implications in models of transplantation and autoimmunity.

The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked advertisement in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

¹ This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R01057409), the Juvenile Diabetic Research Foundation International (1-2006-659), and the Natural Science Foundation of China Overseas Young Investigator Award (#30528007).

² Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Xian C. Li, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, 330 Brookline Avenue, HIM-1025, Boston, MA 02215. E-mail address: xli{at}bidmc.harvard.edu

³ Abbreviation used in this paper: MHC I, MHC class I.