Animal Models of Immune Tolerance in Liver Transplantation

Liver transplantation is the most effective treatment for endstage liver diseases with satisfactory clinical results. Unfortunately, adverse effects of life-long immunosuppression prevent the development of alternative strategies to achieve better long-term outcome. Achieving clinical operational tolerance is the ultimate goal in the clinical transplantation field. Around 15% of liver transplantation recipients develop spontaneous operational tolerance after immunosuppression withdrawal, and the percentage may be even higher in pediatric living donor liver transplantation recipients. Despite the progress, clinical operational tolerance is still rare in liver transplantation. Reprogramming the recipient immune system by creating chimerism and utilizing regulatory cell therapies are among the newer promising means to achieve clinical liver transplantation tolerance in the future. In this review, some proposed mechanism for clinical tolerance and current experimental trial will be introduced.