T Regulatory Cell Therapy

I found the following review articles on T Reg cell therapy which pertains to the basic science article that we just read on Parkinson's Disease. I especially like the title: "Human T Regulatory Cell Therapy: Take a Billion or So and Call Me in the Morning". I have attached the link to the reviews so check them out. Basically, researchers believe that T reg cell transfer is a promising therapy for the treatment of many autoimmune, neurodegenerative, and inflammatory diseases due to the T reg cell's ability to suppress over-reactive immune states. They propose that a patients own T regs can be collected, proliferated ex-vivo and then reintroduced into the patient to increase the regulatory ability of the body's immune system. They also found that in some disease states, a patient's T regs have decreased ability to suppress immune responses, making it hard for adoptive transfer to have useful effects. It is still unknown why there is a depressed response from Tregs in many diseases. To overcome this, the authors propose using stem-cell therapy to create a new line of T regs that are functionally sound and can act to regulate autoimmunity. Most importantly, researchers are hoping that T reg therapy can be used following organ transplantation to suppress that immune response in Graft-Versus-Host Disease. Overall these review articles gives the pros and cons of research thus far into the area of T Regulatory Cell therapy.

http://www.cell.com/immunity/abstract/S1074-7613%2809%2900192-7

http://www.nature.com/nri/journal/v5/n4/full/nri1574.html