Hi I'm Kate the simple biologist and today we're going to be talking about
a paper that was published by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania
What they're looking at is using immune therapy to try to cure
autoimmune diseases!
Generally when we get sick it's from outside invaders like bacteria or viruses
but what happens when the thing making you sick is yourself?
This is what happens in autoimmune diseases and the autoimmune disease that
these researchers chose to focus on is one called pemphigus vulgaris
or PV for short.
PV is an autoimmune disease that affects the skin. It happens when the
immune system recognizes the skin and attacks it - causing lots of inflammation
and cell death.
This leads to people with PV having huge skin blisters!
It's kind of like having burns all over your body!
The paper we're going to talk about today outlines a possible treatment
where they fight fire with fire or, in this case, they fight the disease causing
immune cell with more immune cells. If you can get rid of
the disease-causing immune cell, you can cure PV. In order to understand how more
immune cells can solve the problem, we need to understand what's really going on
in PV. PV starts with an immune cell called a B-cell. B-cells are usually
responsible for recognizing outside invaders like virus or bacteria, but in
the case of PV instead of recognizing an outside invader, these B-cells develop
the ability to recognize a completely normal skin protein. It's kind of like if
you got amnesia and forgot your best friend.
People with PV are continually making these B-cells that are attacking their skin
and if their bodies are constantly making them then how do we stop them?
This paper uses an idea that was thought of before and that idea is to engineer a
killer T-cell. Killer T-cells are part of your immune system, and what they do is
recognize things and kill them.
It's kind of like having your own personal robot that can recognize
a person in a red shirt and then zap them! If you can have one of these killer T-cells
recognize and kill the disease-causing B-cells, you can stop the disease.
But how do you make these killer T-cells recognize these disease-causing b-cells?
What this lab did was create a killer t-cell that's kind of like a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Instead of having a recognition site on the outside...
It instead shows a piece of the normal skin protein on its surface. The same skin
protein that the B-cells usually recognize. So now the B-cells will
recognize the killer T-cell all on its own.
When the B-cell recognizes the T-cell and they come together, the killer T-cell
will kill the disease-causing B-cell! Right now these researchers have
been able to test their killer T-cell on cells in a dish and also in mice that
have been engineered to have PV. Both of those results have turned out really good.
The killer T-cells only kill the disease-causing B-cells, and they don't
kill any of the normal cells either in the mouse or in the dish.
It turns out that creating this immune therapy where you engineer killer T-cells also has another benefit.
The disease-causing B-cells actually have two choices...
They can either recognize the killer T-cells and die or they can try to change
themselves such as they don't come into contact with the killer T-cells anymore.
If they change themselves away from recognizing the killer T-cells...
They can't recognize the skin either! So whether the disease-causing B-cells are
killed by the killer T-cells or whether they just mutate away to avoid
recognizing the killer T-cells, both of those things end up curing the disease!
Overall this is a super cool idea and it's got a lot of initial promise, but
right now it's not done yet. The next steps are to try this therapy in humans
and make sure that it's exactly the same as it is in mice.
They also need to work on how they're going to deliver these engineered killer T-cells
into the person. Once they can figure these out, they can start
testing and reversing this immune disease and maybe even apply this idea
to other autoimmune diseases out there besides just PV!
I hope you enjoyed this video! Feel free to subscribe to my channel for more science videos
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