Tehran University of Medical Sciences Iranian Journal of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology 1735-1502 17 4 2018 08 12 361 371 EN Mahdi Zavvar Department of Immunology, School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran Mohsen Abdolmaleki Department of Immunology, School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran Hamid Farajifard Department of Immunology, School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran Farshid Noorbakhsh Department of Immunology, School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran kayhan Azadmanesh Department of Virology, Pasteur Institute of Iran, Tehran, Iran Mohammad Vojgani Department of Immunology, School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran Mohammad Hossein Nikcnam Department of Immunology, School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran AND Molecular Immunology Research Center, Children's Medical Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 2017 08 05 2017 12 18 Regulatory T cells (Tregs) play a major role in the prevention of autoimmune diseases. Transfer of Foxp3 gene into conventional T cells converts their phenotype to regulatory T cells. Therefore, the question arises as to whether adoptively transferred in vitro differentiated Treg cells specific for a locally expressed antigen might have better inhibitory effects on the progression of the disease as compared with antigen-nonspecific T reg cells. Herein, we investigated the therapeutic potential of primed and unprimed retrovirus mediated Foxp3-overexpression T cells following intravenously injected of these cells into affected rats with collagen-induced arthritis (CIA), an animal model of rheumatoid arthritis. Our analyses demonstrate that systemic administration of collagen II primed Foxp3-transduced T cells could markedly ameliorate CIA inflammatory responses at clinical (p<0.0014) and pathological exchanges including cellular infiltration (p=0.002), bone erosion (p=0.0013) and synovial hyperplasia (p=0.002). In contrast, collagen II unprimed Foxp3-transduced T cells like as collagen II primed or unprimed GFP-transduced T cells did not reveal any beneficial effects on arthritis features as compared with untreated group (p>0.05). Therefore, we believe that collagen II primed Foxp3-transduced T cells are interacting locally and systemically with immune cells which reveled with decreasing of T cells infiltration into joints along with specific CII IgG production. Considering the results described here, it appears that the using patients' T cells which previously exposed to specific antigens may have more effective therapeutic advantage in the production of induced regulatory T cells in the treatment of arthritis. https://ijaai.tums.ac.ir/index.php/ijaai/article/view/1609 https://ijaai.tums.ac.ir/index.php/ijaai/article/download/1609/853