What is it about?
Innate immune cells use a variety of different receptors to find and eliminate unhealthy cells, such as cancer cells, without hurting healthy ones. How can they tell the difference? We developed a simple mathematical model for this process. We assume that immune cells remember the signals they receive from interactions with healthy tissues, allowing them to distinguish ones that are unhealthy. Our model agrees well with experimental data.
Featured Image
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
Why is it important?
It can be hard to understand how immune cells will respond to different stimuli. Our model provides one simple way to make these predictions, which agree with experimental data. This could help us to better understand how to manipulate the immune system to decrease (for example, to reduce the chance that transplant organs will be rejected) or increase (for example, to improve the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy) its activity.
Perspectives
I really enjoyed working together with my co-authors on this paper. Looking toward the future, I'm excited about the potential for us to gain a better quantitative understanding of the immune system, and how we can guide its behavior to improve human health.
John Barton
University of Pittsburgh
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An inference model gives insights into innate immune adaptation and repertoire diversity, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2305859120.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
