Determining the extent of maternal-foetal chimerism in cord blood.

ABSTRACT: During pregnancy, maternal T cells can enter the foetus, leading to maternal-foetal chimerism. This phenomenon may affect how leukaemia patients respond to transplantation therapy using stem cells from cord blood (CB). It has been proposed that maternal T cells, primed to inherited paternal HLAs, are present in CB transplants and help to suppress leukaemic relapse. Several studies have reported evidence for the presence of maternal T cells in most CBs at sufficiently high numbers to lend credence to this idea. We here aimed to functionally characterise maternal T cells from CB. To our surprise, we could not isolate viable maternal cells from CB even after using state-of-the-art enrichment techniques that allow detection of viable cells in heterologous populations at frequencies that were s

SUBMITTER: Opstelten R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6437214 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature