( ing system is not yet known and is unde...)Infant transplant patients resist infections that kill adult AIDS patients

Significance of the Research

The findings are important because they show the immune system is more adaptable and resourceful than once thought. Something other than T cells is working to resist viruses in the post-transplant patients.

The findings also suggest an intriguing strategy for developing new treatments for AIDS, cancers and diseases of impaired immune function related to aging. If this ability of infant-transplant patients' immune systems can be identified and enlisted to fight viruses without T cells, it perhaps could be therapeutically manipulated in adult patients to arrive at new and better treatments for various diseases involving immune system deficiencies.

"We were struck by the fact that when a heart transplant is carried out in very young infants, the thymus that produces T cells is removed and a drug is given that depletes T cells," said Dr. Platt. "Yet the infants don't get the same diseases that adult AIDS patients do, even though the transplanted infants are basically a model of AIDS. In fact, the post-transplant patients do very well resisting infections. It seemed to us very important to understand why this is so, because maybe that would help us help people with age-related diseases caused by declining immunity, or AIDS, or cancers, and understand why certain people tend to be more susceptible to infections."

Background Biology

All healthy people have cells (lymphocytes) with receptors on their surfaces enabling them to recognize many different microorganisms. The diversity of lymphocytes is enormous. Each person has an estimated 1 billion different T cells capable of fighting various infections and another 1 billion of a different kind of immune system cell, the B cell, which produces antibodies. Yet, when the Mayo researchers looked at the immune system of infant heart transplant patients, they found that post transplant the infa
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Source:Mayo Clinic