Vascular endothelial cell apoptosis induced by anti-donor non-MHC antibodies: a possible injury pathway contributing to chronic allograft rejection.

BACKGROUND: Non-major histocompatibility complex (non-MHC) alloantibodies may play a pathogenic role in chronic rejection but remain poorly characterized. METHODS: The kinetics of alloantibody production and the mechanism by which non-MHC alloantibodies cause graft injury were investigated in a Lewis-to-Fischer 344 (LEW-to-F344) rat model of cardiac transplantation. RESULTS: Flow cytometry detected that all the F344 recipients of LEW allografts produced anti-donor immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies reactive with LEW lymphocytes and endothelial cells. A sub-group of recipients that rejected their grafts in 30 to 60 days exhibited markedly increased levels of anti-donor IgG antibodies (n = 6, mean fluorescence intensity [MFI]:23.85 +/- 2.7) than recipients with long-surviving allografts (n = 4, MFI:11.23 +/- 0.81; p = 0.00058). Passive transfer of anti-donor sera induced chronic rejection of LEW heart allografts in an immune non-responsiveness model of F344 rats induced by intrathymic inoculation of donor-specific lymphocytes. Immunoglobulin G antibodies purified from the anti-LEW sera exhibited complement-dependent cytotoxicity against LEW vascular endothelial cells in flow-cytometric cytotoxicity assay. The targeted endothelial cells displayed early (annexin V+) and late (TUNEL+) evidence for programmed cell death. Western blot analysis of poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) demonstrated that the 25-kD PARP-cleavage fragment was present at the lysates of the vascular endothelial cells treated with anti-donor IgG antibodies, indicating apoptosis-associated caspase activity in these cells. In situ teminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP-biotin nick end labeling (TUNEL) staining demonstrated that vascular endothelial cell apoptosis was consistently present in all LEW heart allografts with chronic rejection. CONCLUSIONS: Non-MHC alloantibodies are pathogenic and capable of causing chronic graft injury through an antibody-induced cell apoptosis mechanism. The results emphasize the importance of non-MHC antibodies as a common predisposing factor in the development of chronic rejection.