The ONE Study: A Unified Approach to Evaluating Cellular Immunotherapy in Solid Organ Transplantation

Decades of immunosuppressive drug development has produced an array of powerful pharmacological agents, but the various drawbacks with these treatments leaves considerable room for improvement. By harnessing the power of suppressive mechanisms in the human immune system, regulatory cell therapy may be able to support peripheral tolerance and induce a level of donor-specific unresponsiveness that allows for a reduction in the use of conventional immunosuppression in organ transplant recipients. Several alternative regulatory cell types have been identified as potential adjunct immunotherapies for solid organ transplantation and are now approaching a stage of development that would allow clinical testing in an early-stage trial. The EU-funded international ONE study consortium aims to answer the question as to whether Treg treatment, or other immunoregulatory cell-based therapies, can be advanced in the clinical management of solid organ transplant recipients. This particular Treg trial aims to explored the potential of Treg therapy as an adjunct immunosuppressive treatment in living-donor renal transplant recipients through a clinical protocol design shared by other investigators in the ONE study group testing additional regulatory cell therapies in seperate trials.