E S BARRIE and others Role of ITGAE in autoimmune 224:3 235–243 Research diabetes Role of ITGAE in the development of autoimmune diabetes in non-obese diabetic mice Elizabeth S Barrie, Mels Lodder, Paul H Weinreb1, Jill Buss, Amer Rajab, Christopher Adin2, Qing-Sheng Mi3 and Gregg A Hadley The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Room 216 Tzagournis Medical Research Facility, Correspondence 420 W 12th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43201, USA should be addressed 1Biogen Idec, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA to G A Hadley 2College of Veterinary Medicine, Columbus, Ohio 43201 USA Email 3Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, Michigan 48202, USA
[email protected] Abstract C There is compelling evidence that autoreactive CD8 Tcells play a central role in precipitating Key Words the development of autoimmune diabetes in non-obese diabetic (NOD) mice, but the " diabetes underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Given that ITGAE (CD103) recognizes an islet- " autoimmune restricted ligand (E-cadherin), we postulated that its expression is required for initiation of " immune system disease. We herein use a mouse model of autoimmune diabetes (NOD/ShiLt mice) to test this " mouse C hypothesis. We demonstrate that ITGAE is expressed by a discrete subset of CD8 T cells that infiltrate pancreatic islets before the development of diabetes. Moreover, we demonstrate that development of diabetes in Itgae-deficient NOD mice is significantly delayed at early Journal of Endocrinology but not late time points, indicating that ITGAE is preferentially involved in early diabetes development. To rule out a potential contribution by closely linked loci to this delay, we treated WT NOD mice beginning at 2 weeks of age through 5 weeks of age with a depleting anti-ITGAE mAb and found a decreased incidence of diabetes following anti-ITGAE mAb treatment compared with mice that received isotype control mAbs or non-depleting mAbs to ITGAE.