Basic Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2017. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. May 14, 2017; 23(18): 3240-3251
Published online May 14, 2017. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v23.i18.3240
Thiopurine use associated with reduced B and natural killer cells in inflammatory bowel disease
James D Lord, Donna M Shows
James D Lord, Donna M Shows, Translational Research Program, Benaroya Research Institute, Seattle, WA 98101, United States
James D Lord, Gastroenterology Division, Virginia Mason Medical Center, Seattle, WA 98101, United States
Author contributions: Lord JD designed experiments, analyzed data, and wrote the paper; Shows DM performed cell purification, culture and flow cytometry experiments.
Supported by Virginia Mason Medical Center, Digestive Disease Institute Research Grant Award, No. 0506812-2011.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the Virginia Mason Medical Center/Benaroya Research Institute Institutional Review Board.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors report no potential conflicts of interest with the data in this manuscript.
Data sharing statement: FCS files of flow cytometry data used to generate this manuscript are available upon request from the corresponding author (below).
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: James D Lord, MD, PhD, Research Assistant Member, Translational Research Program, Benaroya Research Institute, 1201 Ninth Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101, United States. jlord@benaroyaresearch.org
Telephone: +1-206-2871088 Fax: +1-206-2875682
Received: December 15, 2016
Peer-review started: December 17, 2016
First decision: December 29, 2016
Revised: January 27, 2017
Accepted: March 15, 2017
Article in press: March 15, 2017
Published online: May 14, 2017
Processing time: 150 Days and 22.5 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Thiopurine medications have been used to treat inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) for almost half a century. However, the effect of thiopurines on the human immune system in vitro remains unclear. The enclosed manuscript performed a thorough flow cytometric analysis of peripheral blood specimens from IBD patients with or without thiopurine therapy and found significant differences in B and NK cell populations associated with therapy. These suggest that thiopurines function to suppress inflammation in IBD not by causing T cell apoptosis, as had been suggested by in vitro data, but rather by depleting other lymphocytes.