Shifting attention towards Tregs

Yesterday I heard a talk by Abul Abbas where two of the main themes were regulatory T cells (Tregs) and interleukin 2. Correctly functioning immunity is the result of a balance between effector cells and Tregs and he emphasized that in trying to develop therapies it might be more valuable to concentrate on influencing the regulatory side. He described a mouse model which he has developed for studying autoimmune disease. One criterion in developing this model was that it should concern the target tissue where an antigen is expressed and not the lymphoid tissue. Another is that the target tissue should be easily accessible for doing experiments in vivo. For this reason he chose the skin. In this transgenic model antigen expression can be turned on and off by feeding the mice with doxycyclin. When the antigen is turned on an autoimmune disease results. If it is turned off the mice recover. If it is turned on again the mice get sick again but much less than the first time. This is reminiscent of ordinary immunity which is due to memory effector cells. In this case it seems that there are memory Tregs. This suggests the idea that a possible cause of autoimmune disease in humans could be a lack of memory Tregs.

When IL-2 was first discovered it was known for causing T cells to proliferate and thus strengthening the immune response. More recently it has been found that eliminating IL-2 does not necessarily act in an immunosuppressive way. Apparently it can be replaced by something else in driving the proliferation of effector T cells. On the other hand it also drives the proliferation of Tregs and Abbas argued that this is its most essential function. In that case it cannot be replaced.

The lecturer made a number of interesting comments about themes such as immunology, therapies for immune disorders and cancer, clinical trials etc. I did not note them down and I cannot reproduce them here. Nevertheless I have the impression that a learned of lot of things which I might profit from in the future.