title: Improving the safety of tolerance induction: chimerism and cellular co-treatment strategies applied to vascularized composite allografts.
abstract: Although vascularized composite allografts (VCAs) have been performed clinically for a variety of indications, potential complications from long-term immunosuppression and graft-versus-host disease remain important barriers to widespread applications. Recently it has been demonstrated that VCAs incorporating a vascularized long bone in a rat model provide concurrent vascularized bone marrow transplantation that, itself, functions to establish hematopoietic chimerism and donor-specific tolerance following non-myeloablative conditioning of recipients. Advances such as this, which aim to improve the safety profile of tolerance induction, will help usher in an era of wider clinical VCA application for nonlife-saving reconstructions.
authors.affiliation: Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Tzu Chi General Hospital, New Taipei 231, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Wei-Chao
authors.initials: WC
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Jeng-Yee
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.forename: Christopher Glenn
authors.initials: CG
authors.lastname: Wallace
authors.forename: Fu-Chan
authors.initials: FC
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.forename: Shuen-Kuei
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Liao
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D016026:Bone Marrow Transplantation / Q000009:adverse effects / Q000276:immunology; D046528:Chimerism; D006801:Humans; D018183:Transplantation Chimera / Q000276:immunology*; D023001:Transplantation Tolerance / Q000276:immunology*; D014184:Transplantation, Homologous / Q000276:immunology