Portuguese Scientists Discover An Extraordinary New Type Of White Blood Cell
Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - 17:28
in Health & Medicine
One of the biggest challenges of transplants is the need to suppress the immune response - so the new organ is not rejected - while keeping it strong enough to be able to fight all kinds of disease. As the high numbers of rejected organs show, this is a tricky balance. But a discovery by Maria Monteiro and Luis Graça, two Portuguese scientists, could help solving the problem, at least in the liver. They have found a new type of white blood cell – baptised NKTreg (reg from regulatory) – that, remarkably, once activated, migrate into this organ where it suppress any immune response in its vicinity (but not elsewhere). read more