Every year individuals receive hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) to eradicate malignant and nonmalignant disease. The immunobiology of allotransplantation is an area of ongoing discovery, from the recipient's conditioning treatment prior to the transplant to the donor cell populations responsible for engraftment, graft-versus-host disease, and graft-versus-tumor effect. In this review, we focus on donor-type immunoregulatory T cells, namely, natural killer T cells (NKT) and regulatory T cells (Treg), and their current and potential roles in tolerance induction after allogeneic HSCT.
Keywords: Allogeneic transplantation; GVHD; GVT; NKT; immunoregulation; regulatory T cells; transplant tolerance.