Alloreactive Natural Killer Cells Initiate a Unique Cellular and Molecular Pathway That Greatly Accelerates Immune Reconstitution after Allogeneic Bone Marrow Transplantation

One outstanding issue in allogeneic hematopoietic transplantation is impaired immune reconstitution. As the primary site of T cell development, the thymus plays a key role in the generation of a strong yet self-tolerant adaptive immune response, essential in the face of the potential threat from pathogens or neoplasia. Allogeneic hematopoietic transplantation may acutely damage the thymus through the chemo or radiotherapy, antibody therapy of the conditioning regime, infections acquired by the immunosuppressed patient, and thymic graft versus host disease. To date, attempts to improve thymic reconstitution have been disappointing. Pre-clinical experiments and pilot clinical trials tried to assess the role of a variety of therapeutic approaches, such as transfer of lymphoid progenitor cells, thymic grafts, or enhancement of thymopoiesis by administration of hormonal or cytokine/growth factor-based therapies, such as sex-steroid blockade, and IL-7, IL-22, KGF, or Flt-3 ligand administration (reviewed in Chaudhry et al., Immunol Rev. 2016). In mouse MHC mismatched transplantation models (F1 H-2d/b→parent H-2b), we previously found that infusion of donor versus recipient alloreactive NK cells eradicated recipient-type lympho-hematopoietic lineage cells, thereby enhancing engraftment, protecting from GvHD and eradicating leukemia (Ruggeri et al., Science 2002). Here, in the same models we show that infusion of alloreactive NK cells greatly accelerates the post-hematopoietic transplant recovery of donor-type immune cells, i.e., dendritic cells (DCs) (p<0.001), B lineage cells (p<0.001) and thymocytes (p<0.001) and maturation to B (p<0.001) and T cells (p<0.001). By the use of recipient chimeric mice displaying different tissue (i.e., hematopoietic vs non-hematopoietic) susceptibility to donor alloreactive NK cell killing, we show that a specific interaction between donor alloreactive NK cells and recipient DCs is responsible for the accelerated immune rebuilding. We find that donor-versus-recipient alloreactive NK cells trigger recipient DCs to synthesize a protein factor in a DNA translation-depended fashion (i.e., blocking DNA transcription in DCs abrogated the DC ability to produce the factor), and release it. Infusion of NK/DC co-culture supernatants containing this factor induced bone marrow and thymic stromal cells to produce IL-7 (p<0.001) and c-Kit ligand (p<0.001) and, thereby, the extraordinarily accelerated maturation of donor DCs, B- and T-cell precursors. Interestingly, in vitro experiments with human thymic stromal cells that support human thymocyte proliferation and differentiation demonstrated the exact same mechanisms. Supernatants from human alloreactive NK cell clones and human (HLA-class I KIR ligand mismatched) allogeneic DCs induced IL-7 production by human thymic stromal cells which in turn supported accelerated proliferation and maturation of human thymocytes (p<0.001). The murine and the human "immune rebuilding" factors displayed biochemical similarities as they both are highly hydrophobic 12KDa molecular weight proteins. Mass spectrometry analysis by stable isotope labeling with amino acids in cell culture (SILAC) identified Beta-2 Microglobulin (B2M) as the newly synthesized protein sharing the above biochemical features and present both in murine and human samples. B2M-KO mice used as recipients of MHC mismatched bone marrow transplant and given donor versus recipient alloreactive NK cells were unable to undergo accelerated immune rebuilding. However, their defect was repaired and accelerated rebuilding of donor-type DCs (p<0.001), B lineage cells (p<0.001) and thymocytes (p<0.001) was restored by the administration of culture supernatants obtained from alloreactive NK cells and wild-type (non-KO) MHC mismatched DCs. Finally, RNA interference experiments that silenced the B2M gene in human DCs resulted in loss of biological activity of supernatants obtained from alloreactive NK cells and B2M-silenced DCs. B2M plays a key role in the immune system as it is known to be part of MHC class I molecules. However, its role in signaling for immune precursor cell development has never been recognized. Here we report the discovery of a novel cellular and molecular pathway initiated by alloreactive NK cells and mediated by B2M that leads to greatly accelerated rebuilding of B and T cells after hematopoietic transplantation.