Staying to Help

Great teams have both youthful ambition and battle-worn experience. In the body, the experience of past trials is provided by immune cells called memory T cells, which persist after one infection to guard against returning foes. These are well studied in some parts of the body like the blood, but relatively unknown within tissues themselves. A new study has revealed them in the lungs, lingering long after influenza infection and able to tackle reinfection, even from a different strain of the virus. Keeping watch at the infection site makes sense, and researchers found both alarm-raising cells and those that empower B cells – other immune system players that produce disease-fighting antibodies. The T cells (highlighted pink) closely aligned with B cells (blue) on infection to boost the defensive action. If vaccinations against any viruses could boost the production of these resident guardians, they could provide longer-lasting immunity, even against new, lockdown-inducing variants.

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 Nivedya Swarnalekha and David Schreiner, and colleagues published on the cover of Science Immunology
• Immune Cell Biology Laboratory, Department of Biomedicine, University of Basel, University Hospital Basel, Basel, Switzerland
• Image copyright held by and reproduced with permission from the AAAS
• Published in Science Immunology, January 2021