Discoveries
Findings about immune cells' readiness against disease may help with cancer vaccines and organ transplants
Vassiliki Boussiotis, MD, PhD
More vigilant than Minute-men, the immune system's T cells form one of the main lines of defense against infection and disease. A recent study by Dana-Farber investigators is rewriting scientists' understanding of how the cells are alerted to enemy invaders.
Researchers led by Vassiliki Boussiotis, MD, PhD, found that a signal from a gene called Tob keeps the cells in a dormant, or "quiescent," state. Only when that gene is shut off — when an infection is afoot — do the cells become activated against disease.
"The quiescent state isn't something the cells lapse into, as had been previously thought, but one they must actively maintain," Boussiotis says. The finding has direct implications for the development of cancer vaccines and for safer techniques of organ transplantation.
Cancer vaccines seek to rouse the immune system to attack cancer cells. Organ transplantation, by contrast, aims to "densensitize" the immune system to foreign tissue so it doesn't launch a biochemical strike against the donated organs. Knowing how to switch Tob on and off — thereby putting T cells either to sleep or on high alert — could lead to more potent vaccines and transplantation techniques that don't require patients to take as many anti-rejection drugs.
The research was published in Nature Immunology.
