A Novel Approach to the Construction of Thymus Organoids

The thymus is a small but important organ; it is where thymocytes originally generated in the bone marrow mature to become T cells of the adaptive immune system. Unfortunately the active tissue of the thymus is slowly replaced by fat over the course of later life, and the supply of new T cells dwindles. This is a significant contributing cause of the age-related decline in immune function. Lacking reinforcements and replacements, the adaptive immune system becomes cluttered with senescent, exhausted, overspecialized, and just plain broken cells. It becomes overly active and inflammatory, but at the same time ineffective. It progressively becomes ever less competent when it comes to destroying cancerous and senescent cells, and defending against pathogens. This is all well recognized, and over the years a range of efforts to regenerate the thymus have been undertaken. As of yet few have progressed much further than animal studies in mice. Recombinant KGF, which works quite well to enlarge the thymus in mice and non-human primates, failed utterly in a human trial, showing absolutely no effect. More recently, the staff at Intervene Immune have been combining some of the older and unreliable methods, such as use of growth hormone, into human tests of thymic regrowth. All of these approaches, and a few others, largely boil down to ways to upregulate FOXN1, the master controlling gene of thymic growth and T cell maturation activity. The most compelling studies in mice have b...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs