Tailored Thymus Organoids Produce Specifically Configured T Cells

The thymus atrophies considerably following childhood, and then declines further in old age. This organ is where the immune cells called T cells mature, and its decline limits the pace at which new T cells are generated. The slow and faltering rate of immune cell creation is one of the contributing factors to immune system aging; it effectively caps the number of cells present in the body, and that population becomes ever more misconfigured due to exposure to persistent pathogens such as cytomegalovirus. Expanding the supply of immune cells should help to restore some of the lost immune function in older people, and engineering additional thymus tissue for transplantation is one possible approach to this goal. Researchers are making good progress in generating small amounts of functional thymus tissue. As this research demonstrates, the scientific community is now able to adjust the resulting tissue in order to generate T cells with specific desired characteristics. Researchers have created a new system to produce human T cells, the white blood cells that fight against disease-causing intruders in the body. The system could be utilized to engineer T cells to find and attack cancer cells, which means it could be an important step toward generating a readily available supply of T cells for treating many different types of cancer. The thymus sits in the front of the heart and plays a central role in the immune system. It uses blood stem cells to make T cells, which help...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs