Suppression of murine experimental autoimmune hepatitis by T‐cell vaccination or immunosuppression

Patients with autoimmune hepatitis (AIH) usually require immunosuppressive therapy for many years, if not for a lifetime. Experimental immunotherapy such as T‐cell vaccination aims at manipulating the immune system in such a way that autoimmunity is specifically regulated to enable long‐lasting correction of the disease process. We aimed to test the feasibility of T‐cell vaccination as well as conventional immunosuppression in the murine model of experimental autoimmune hepatitis (EAH). EAH was induced in 5‐ to 7‐week‐old BALB/c mice by immunization with syngeneic liver homogenate in complete Freund's adjuvant. For T‐cell vaccination, splenocytes were removed from animals 14 days after induction of EAH and from control animals, and activated in vitro by mitogen stimulation with Concanavalin A (Con A). Activated T cells were irradiated and injected at 5 × 107 cells per animal as T‐cell vaccine. Immunosuppression in control animals was performed with prednisolone with or without azathioprine. T‐cell vaccination with T cells from EAH animals, but not with irrelevant T cells, was able to protect animals from EAH, reducing the average disease severity from 2.2 (±0.3) to 0.5 (±0.3) (P