The secret of anti-cancer hidden in diabetic patients? New research discovers where the immune army comes from

There are usually two types of diseases related to immune system abnormalities.

Type 1 diabetes falls into the latter category.

Where do these bad T cells come from? A new study in Nature has found the answer to this question

Researchers from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center constructed a batch of diabetic model mice, and marked and tracked CD8+ T cells closely related to autoimmune diseases for more than 30 weeks

Like other immune cells, CD8+ T cells move in the lymphatic vessels.

For patients with type 1 diabetes, T cells enter the pancreas from the lymph nodes near the pancreas to find and kill the islet B cells

In that case, why pancreatic islet B cells are still going to die in a large area? The reason is that the reserve army of T cells will continue to flow in

Therefore, when the T cells in the pancreas die, the T cells in the lymph nodes continuously flow to the pancreas and continue to complete their work, eventually leading to the large-scale death of pancreatic islet B cells

▲T cells like stem cells will continue to cause islet B cell damage (picture source: reference [1])

In order to verify whether their speculation is correct, the researchers managed to obtain T cells from the lymph nodes of the diseased mouse, and then transplanted these cells into another mouse.

In contrast, when 100,000 pancreatic T cells are directly transplanted into a healthy mouse, it will not cause them to develop diabetes, and the use of drugs to prevent the migration of T cells from the lymph nodes can also protect the mice.

This is the first time that the scientific community has noticed that such T cells are related to type 1 diabetes.

Note: The original text has been deleted

Reference materials:

[1] Discovery of stem-like T cell in type 1 diabetes can potentially improve cancer immunotherapy.

[2] Andrea Schietinger, An autoimmune stem-like CD8 T cell population drives type 1 diabetes, Nature (2021).