Low immunogenicity of neural progenitor cells differentiated from induced pluripotent stem cells derived from less immunogenic somatic cells

PLoS One. 2013 Jul 26;8(7):e69617. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0069617. Print 2013.

Abstract

The groundbreaking discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) provides a new source for cell therapy. However, whether the iPS derived functional lineages from different cell origins have different immunogenicity remains unknown. It had been known that the cells isolated from extra-embryonic tissues, such as umbilical cord mesenchymal cells (UMCs), are less immunogenic than other adult lineages such as skin fibroblasts (SFs). In this report, we differentiated iPS cells from human UMCs and SFs into neural progenitor cells (NPCs) and analyzed their immunogenicity. Through co-culture with allologous peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), we showed that UMCs were indeed less immunogenic than skin cells to simulate proliferation of PBMCs. Surprisingly, we found that the NPCs differentiated from UMC-iPS cells retained low immunogenicity as the parental UMCs based on the PBMC proliferation assay. In cytotoxic expression assay, reactions in most kinds of immune effector cells showed more perforin and granzyme B expression with SF-NPCs stimulation than that with UMC-NPCs stimulation in PBMC co-culture system, in T cell co-culture system as well. Furthermore, through whole genome expression microarray analysis, we showed that over 70 immune genes, including all members of HLA-I, were expressed at lower levels in NPCs derived from UMC-iPS cells than that from SF-iPS cells. Our results demonstrated a phenomenon that the low immunogenicity of the less immunogenic cells could be retained after cell reprogramming and further differentiation, thus provide a new concept to generate functional lineages with lower immunogenicity for regenerative medicine.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Cell Differentiation / immunology*
  • Cell Proliferation
  • Coculture Techniques
  • Embryonic Stem Cells / cytology
  • Fibroblasts / cytology*
  • Granzymes / metabolism
  • HLA Antigens / metabolism
  • Humans
  • Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells / cytology*
  • Kinetics
  • Leukocytes, Mononuclear / cytology
  • Mesoderm / cytology
  • Models, Biological
  • Neural Stem Cells / cytology*
  • Neural Stem Cells / immunology*
  • Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis
  • Perforin / metabolism
  • Skin / cytology
  • Umbilical Cord / cytology

Substances

  • HLA Antigens
  • Perforin
  • Granzymes

Associated data

  • GEO/GSE46647

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (31000402), Ministry of Science and Technology 973 Program (2011CB965204, 2012CB966802), the “Strategic Priority Research Program” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA01020401, XDA01020202), 863 Program (2011AA020109), Ministry of Science and Technology International Technology Cooperation Program (2012DFH30050), and National S&T Major Special Project on Major New Drug Innovation (No.2011ZX09102-010-01).” The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.