ROLE OF THE CHEMOKINES IN EXPERIMENTAL AUTOIMMUNE GASTRITIS

Judith Field, Frank Alderuccio, Aiden Marshall, and Ban Hock Toh.

Department of Pathology and Immunology, Monash University Medical School, Melbourne, Victoria, 3181

The role of chemokines in neonatal thymectomy induced experimental autoimmune gastritis (EAG) was investigated by use of the chemokine antagonist met-RANTES, which binds the CC chemokine receptor CCR5, thereby blocking the binding of natural ligand RANTES. Met-RANTES has previously been shown to reduce the incidence of collagen induced arthritis in a mouse model. No difference in the incidence of autoantibodies to the gastric H+/K+ATPase and parietal cells was observed between met-RANTES treated neonatally thymectomised (nTx'd) mice and control nTx'd mice which received injections of Hens Egg Lyzozyme (HEL) or no injection. No difference in the incidence or severity of destruction of parietal and zymogenic cells was observed. These results show that autoreactive cells are able to infiltrate the gastric mucosa and that pathogenic function is not perturbed, despite the lack of chemotactic stimuli due to the absence of chemokine binding to CCR5. These results suggest that RANTES may not be important in the development of EAG, or that its role is unclear due to the redundancy of the chemokine system.