Therapy with dendritic cells (DCs) control fetal abortion rate in the CBA/J x DBA/2J mouse model

SANDRA M. BLOIS, SOFIA OLMOS, ANA C. ZENCLUSSEN, CATALINA ALBA SOTO, EDUARDO CHULUYAN, KARINA ARIAS, TERESA GENTILE, PETRA ARCK, RICARDO MARGNI

Wiemar, Germany

Congreso; 8th Congress of the Alps-Adria Society for Immunology of Reproduction; 2002

Alps-Adria Society for Immunology of Reproduction

DBA/2J mated CBA/J female mice are prone to a high incidence of fetakl abortions. This fetal wastage can be dramatically reduced by immunizing the female mice with BALB/c but not DBA/2J spleen cells during early gestation, whereas underlying mechanisms remain to be elucidated. recently, DCs have been described at the feto-maternal interface in human uterus. The main of this study was to analyse the role of DCs in the maintenance of pregnancy in the CBA/J x DBA/2J model. Bone marrow derived DCs were generated from virgin femnale CBA/J mice (6-8 weeks old) by using a modified version of Inaba´s et al. technique, some of the DCs were pulsed with paternal DBA/2J antigens lysate ex- vivo. Immunization with DCs of the CBA/J females took place twice before matings. Four different experimental groups were included:1) no treatment control, 2)mice injected with conditioned medium (GM-CSF), 3)immunized with DCs alone, 4) immunized with antigen pulsed DCs, n=5 respectively. Therapy with paternal antigen lisate pulsed DCs as well as the therapy with DCs alone significantly reduced the abortion rate from 23,8% in Group 1 to 17,6% in Group 2 and 2.2% in Group 3 and to 5% in Group 4. Our results indicate a protective role of DCs at the feto-maternal interface during pregnancy. Putative pathways are the induction of an immunological response necesaary in the prevention of abortion, i. e. a Th2 milieu or the production of assymetric antibodies. These preliminary results may foster additional experiments on DCs in reproductive biology, which may soon be translated into clinically relevant health applications in a novewl area of DCs research.