Stubborn Cells
When you buy a second-hand car, sometimes it bears traces of its previous owner – lingering smells or forgotten belongings. And when patients receive an organ transplant, they also accept some of the previous owners’ molecular residue. Tissue-resident memory T cells are immune cells restricted to one organ, that come along inside a transplant. Since they don’t flow around the body like other immune cells, we’ve had limited opportunities to study them in humans until a new study looking at 20 lung transplant recipients. They found these specialised residents – highlighted in green in the transplanted lung section pictured – persisting up to a year after transplantation, long after other donor immune cells have gone. Higher levels of these stubborn cells correlated with better patient outcomes, so the study might have found a new indicator of transplant health for doctors, as well as revealing key details about this little-understood facet of the immune system.
Written by Anthony Lewis
- Image from work by Mark E. Snyder and colleagues
- Columbia Center for Translational Immunology, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY, USA
- Image reprinted with permission from the AAAS – the American Association for the Advancement of Science
- Published in Science Immunology, March 2019
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