Mesenchymal stem cells overexpressing IL-35: a novel immunosuppressive strategy and therapeutic target for inducing transplant tolerance

Inducing donor-specific immunological tolerance, which avoids the complications of long-term immunosuppression, is an important goal in organ transplantation. Interleukin-35 (IL-35), a cytokine identified in 2007, is mainly secreted by regulatory T cells (Tregs) and is essential for Tregs to exert their maximal immunoregulatory activity in vitro and in vivo. A growing number of studies show that IL-35 plays an important role in autoimmune diseases and infectious diseases. Recent research has shown that IL-35 could effectively alleviate allograft rejection and has the potential to be a novel therapeutic strategy for graft rejection. With increasing study of immunoregulation, cell-based therapy has become a novel approach to attenuate rejection after transplantation. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), which exhibit important properties of multilineage differentiation, tissue repair, and immunoregulation, have recently emerged as attractive candidates for cell-based therapeutics, especially in transplantation. Accumulating evidence demonstrates that the therapeutic abilities of MSCs can be amplified by gene modification. Therefore, researchers have constructed IL-35 gene-modified MSCs and explored their functions and mechanisms in some disease models. In this review, we discuss the potential tolerance-inducing effects of MSCs in transplantation and briefly introduce the immunoregulatory functions of the IL-35 gene-modified MSCs. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13287-018-0988-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.