Stubborn Cells

When you buy a second-hand car, sometimes it bears traces of its previous owner – lingering smells or forgotten belongings. And when patients receive an organ transplant, they also accept some of the previous owners’ molecular residue. Tissue-resident memory T cells are immune cells restricted to one organ, that come along inside a transplant. Since they don’t flow around the body like other immune cells, we’ve had limited opportunities to study them in humans until a new study looking at 20 lung transplant recipients. They found these specialised residents – highlighted in green in the transplanted lung section pictured – persisting up to a year after transplantation, long after other donor immune cells have gone. Higher levels of these stubborn cells correlated with better patient outcomes, so the study might have found a new indicator of transplant health for doctors, as well as revealing key details about this little-understood facet of the immune system.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Mark E. Snyder and colleagues
• Columbia Center for Translational Immunology, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY, USA
• Image reprinted with permission from the AAAS - the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Published in Science Immunology, March 2019