First ever 'atlas' of T cells in human body

Findings could lead to new vaccine strategies

2012-12-20

(Press-News.org) New York, NY (December 20, 2012) — By analyzing tissues harvested from organ donors, Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers have created the first ever "atlas" of immune cells in the human body. Their results provide a unique view of the distribution and function of T lymphocytes in healthy individuals. In addition, the findings represent a major step toward development of new strategies for creating vaccines and immunotherapies. The study was published today in the online edition of the journal Immunity.

T cells, a type of white blood cell, play a major role in cell-mediated immunity, in which the immune system produces various types of cells to defend the body against pathogens, cancer cells, and foreign substances.

"We found that T cells are highly compartmentalized — that is, each tissue we examined had its own complement of T cells," said study leader Donna L. Farber, PhD, professor of surgical sciences at CUMC and a principal investigator with the new Columbia Center for Translational Immunology (CCTI), directed by Megan Sykes, MD. "The results were remarkably similar in all donors, even though these people were very different in terms of age, background, and lifestyle."

The researchers also discovered a receptor that is expressed on the surface of "tissue-resident" T cells but not on circulating T cells. Using this marker, Dr. Farber and her colleagues established that the blood is its own compartment. "In other words, T cells found in circulation are not the same as T cells in the tissues," said Dr. Farber.

According to the researchers, the findings establish a baseline for T-cell immunity in healthy individuals. This knowledge can be used to better understand how various tissues respond to site-specific and systemic autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. The findings can therefore powerfully inform the development of new vaccine strategies. "To make better vaccines, it may be necessary to activate a T-cell response at the site of an infection, not just in the general circulation," said Dr. Farber. "But first we have to know what types of immune cells are in those tissues and how they function. This is a first step in that direction."

To study T cells, researchers need multiple tissue samples, which cannot be taken from healthy individuals. Working with the New York Organ Donor Network, the organ procurement organization for the greater New York metropolitan area, CUMC researchers obtained tissue samples from 24 individual organ donors. Samples were taken from tissues that have direct contact with pathogens, including lymph, lung, spleen, and small and large intestines. The donors, all of whom had died suddenly of traumatic causes, ranged in age from 15 to 60. All were HIV-negative and free of cancer and other chronic or immunological diseases.

"Most of what we have known about human T cells is based on studies of the blood, because it is so accessible," said Dr. Farber. "But that is only a small sampling of the body's T cells. We already had good evidence, from mouse studies, that other tissues have their own types of T cells and that they play an important role in mediating immune protection. We wanted to find out if this was the case in humans."

### The title of the paper is "Distribution and compartmentalization of human circulating and tissue-resident memory T cell subsets." The other contributors are Taheri Sathaliyawala (CUMC), Masaru Kubota (CUMC), Naomi Yudanin (CUMC), Damian Turner (CUMC), Philip Camp (CUMC), Joseph J. C. Thome (CUMC), Kara L. Bickham (CUMC), Harvey Lerner (New York Organ Donor Network, New York, NY), Michael Goldstein (New York Organ Donor Network and Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York, NY), Megan Sykes (CUMC), and Tomoaki Kato (CUMC).

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant # RC1AI086164 ).

The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.

Columbia University Medical Center provides international leadership in basic, pre-clinical and clinical research; medical and health sciences education; and patient care. The medical center trains future leaders and includes the dedicated work of many physicians, scientists, public health professionals, dentists, and nurses at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Mailman School of Public Health, the College of Dental Medicine, the School of Nursing, the biomedical departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and allied research centers and institutions. Established in 1767, Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons was the first institution in the United States to grant the MD degree and is among the country's most selective medical schools. Columbia University Medical Center is home to the largest medical research enterprise in New York City and State and one of the largest in the United States. www.cumc.columbia.edu

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Peel-and-Stick solar panels from Stanford engineering

2012-12-20

For all their promise, solar cells have frustrated scientists in one crucial regard – most are rigid. They must be deployed in stiff, often heavy, fixed panels, limiting their applications. So researchers have been trying to get photovoltaics to loosen up. The ideal: flexible, decal-like solar panels that can be peeled off like band-aids and stuck to virtually any surface, from papers to window panes. Now the ideal is real. Stanford researchers have succeeded in developing the world's first peel-and-stick thin-film solar cells. The breakthrough is described in a ...

Cellphone, GPS data suggest new strategy for alleviating traffic tie-ups

2012-12-20

Asking all commuters to cut back on rush-hour driving reduces traffic congestion somewhat, but asking specific groups of drivers to stay off the road may work even better. The conclusion comes from a new analysis by engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, that was made possible by their ability to track traffic using commuters' cellphone and GPS signals. This is the first large-scale traffic study to track travel using anonymous cellphone data rather than survey data or information obtained from U.S. Census ...

Research pinpoints key gene for regenerating cells after heart attack

2012-12-20

DALLAS – Dec. 20, 2012 – UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have pinpointed a molecular mechanism needed to unleash the heart's ability to regenerate, a critical step toward developing eventual therapies for damage suffered following a heart attack. Cardiologists and molecular biologists at UT Southwestern, teaming up to study in mice how heart tissue regenerates, found that microRNAs – tiny strands that regulate gene expression – contribute to the heart's ability to regenerate up to one week after birth. Soon thereafter the heart loses the ability to regenerate. ...

Shedding light on Anderson localization

2012-12-20

This press release is available in German. Waves do not spread in a disordered medium if there is less than one wavelength between two defects. Physicists from the universities of Zurich and Constance have now proved Nobel Prize winner Philip W. Anderson's theory directly for the first time using the diffusion of light in a cloudy medium. Light cannot spread in a straight line in a cloudy medium like milk because the many droplets of fat divert the light as defects. If the disorder – the concentration of defects – exceeds a certain level, the waves are no longer ...

Small wasps to control a big pest?

2012-12-20

With the purpose of developing new biological methods to control one of the major pests affecting the southwest Europe pine stands, a joint collaboration leaded by the Instituto Nacional de Investigação Agrária e Veterinária, Portugal (R. Petersen-Silva, P. Naves, E. Sousa), together with the Universidad de Barcelona, Spain (J. Pujade-Villar) and a member of the Museum and Institute of Zoology from the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland, (S. Belokobylskij) initiated a research to detect the parasitoid guild of the Pine Wood Nematode (PWN) vector, Monochamus galloprovincialis ...

Sync to grow

2012-12-20

From a single-cell egg to a fully functional body: as embryos develop and grow, they must form organs that are in proportion to the overall size of the embryo. The exact mechanism underlying this fundamental characteristic, called scaling, is still unclear. However, a team of researchers from EMBL Heidelberg is now one step closer to understanding it. They have discovered that scaling of the future vertebrae in a mouse embryo is controlled by how the expression of some specific genes oscillates, in a coordinated way, between neighbouring cells. Published today in Nature, ...

Silver sheds light on superconductor secrets

2012-12-20

The first report on the chemical substitution, or doping, using silver atoms, for a new class of superconductor that was only discovered this year, is about to be published in EPJ B. Chinese scientists from Institute of Solid State Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei, discovered that the superconductivity is intrinsic rather than created by impurities in this material with a sandwich-style layered structure made of bismuth oxysulphide (Bi4O4S3). Superconductors with a transition temperature (TC) above the boiling temperature of liquid nitrogen (77 kelvins or −196 ...

Gene expression improves the definition of a breast cancer subtype

2012-12-20

The study conducted by the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) in conjunction with the GEICAM cooperative group and other American and Canadian researchers has led to a change in the definition of hormone-sensitive breast tumours. Barcelona, 20 December 2012. Gene expression in breast cancer provides valuable biological information for better determining the diagnosis, treatment, risk of relapse and survival rate. However, the most common form of characterizing breast cancer is by histopathological techniques. This study, headed by Dr Aleix Prat, Head of the Translational ...

2 problems in chemical catalysis solved

2012-12-20

The research group of Professor Petri Pihko at the Department of Chemistry and the NanoScience Center of the University of Jyväskylä has solved two acute problems in chemical catalysis. The research has been funded by the Academy of Finland. In the first project, the researchers designed a novel intramolecularly assisted catalyst for the synthesis of beta amino acids. Previously published catalysts work only with aromatic side chains in the imines, but the new catalyst designed at Jyväskylä does not have this limitation. The new method might find uses in the synthesis ...

Stroke drug kills bacteria that cause ulcers and tuberculosis

2012-12-20

Bethesda, MD—A drug currently being used to treat ischemic strokes may prove to be a significant advance in the treatment of tuberculosis and ulcers. In a new research report appearing online in The FASEB Journal, a compound called ebselen effectively inhibits the thioredoxin reductase system in a wide variety of bacteria, including Helicobacter pylori which causes gastric ulcers and Mycobacterium tuberculosis which causes tuberculosis. Thioredoxin and thioredoxin reductase proteins are essential for bacteria to make new DNA, and protect them against oxidative stress caused ...

First ever 'atlas' of T cells in human body

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: