The thymus gland trains young blood cells to know which
disease-carriers to attack and which cells to leave alone. Mature cells, called
T cells, leave the thymus ready for battle. A team at the AIDS Research Center
at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston announced they had created a
lab-grown thymus- a crucial first step on the road to rebuilding devastated
immune systems. Poznansky's team is betting it will be able to manipulate
artificial thymuses to produce disease-specific T cells. "It will be
potentially useful for reconstituting the T cell system of a patient who has
AIDS, because in AIDS you get both a depletion of T cells and damage to the
thymus," says Poznansky.
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
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