Experimental basis for the treatment of autoimmune diseases with autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.

Preclinical research with autologous bone marrow transplantation has been performed in two models of autoimmune disease using Buffalo rats. In this strain, adjuvant arthritis develops as a chronic progressive systemic type of arthritis and experimental allergic encephalomyelitis as a chronic remitting relapsing disease. In these models, the influence of various treatment parameters was studied, among them the conditioning regimen, the composition of the graft and the effect of reimmunization of cured animals. Continued research in animal models is recommended to solve problems that have emerged from the experience with several hundreds of severely ill autoimmune patients treated thus far with autologous stem cells.