by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Credit: CC0 Public Domain T cells are a special class of white blood cells that patrol the body and attack infected or foreign tissue. They learn to distinguish friendly proteins from dangerous ones in an organ called the thymus. However, when T cells mistakenly identify healthy proteins as foreign, it can...
By Benedette Cuffari, M.Sc.Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc. Both acute and chronic stress in many different forms can lead to a condition known as acute thymic atrophy, which can severely impact the health of the immune system. Thymus. Image Credit: Nerthuz/Shutterstock.com What is the thymus? Except for jawless fish, the thymus is found in all vertebrates. The...
The age-related decline of the immune system has several causes, but the involution of the thymus is an important one. The thymus is responsible for the production of mature T cells of the adaptive immune system, but the organ atrophies with age. The supply of new T cells falls off dramatically in later life, and...
by Kristin Samuelson, Northwestern University After a patient is diagnosed with lymphoma—an often-treatable type of cancer that attacks the lymph nodes, spleen, thymus, bone marrow and more—the natural next steps are determining the patient’s survival outlook and deciding the best course of treatment. But current methods of doing so remain inaccurate or invasive, often involving...
T cells (red) that were produced using artificial thymic organoids developed by UCLA scientists. UCLA researchers have created a new system to produce human T cells, the white blood cells that fight against disease-causing intruders in the body. The system could be utilized to engineer T cells to find and attack cancer cells, which...
