Epithelial molecules shaping immunosurveillance by local T cells

Immunology Interest Group Seminar Series The thesis of conventional immunology is centralized control whereby responses to infection within tissues are decided within lymph nodes, from which effector T lymphocytes are dispatched to quell regional disturbances. But this cannot explain the observation that many tissues at steady state are T cell-rich. Do such cells simply provide responses to infection or do they provide more generalized means to sustain tissue integrity and organ function? Likewise, how are such cells able to respond to acute stress but not drive constitutive tissue inflammation? And, how do immune cell – tissue interactions relate to organ physiology? To approach these questions, we have employed molecular genetics to identify key receptor-ligand axes that tissues use to communicate with their local T cell compartments at rest, upon infection and upon non-infectious dysregulation. These axes show how epithelial cells in the thymus and at body surfaces selectively educate specific T cell subtypes, thereby establishing the organ-specific composition and activities of local T cells. The molecules mediating epithelial control over tissue T cell immunity are implicated in inflammatory disease and cancer and offer hope for highly localized clinical regulation. Adrian Hayday was trained in biochemistry at Cambridge, and obtained a PhD in molecular virology from London University. He began studying immunology in 1982 at MIT, where he and his colleagues first descri...
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