Effective Protection against Destructive Immune System
Anti-Aggression Unit against Auto-immune Diseases
The body’s protective system, the immune system, has two difficult tasks to perform. On the one hand, it must produce an army of defensive cells that protect us against bacteria, viruses and other harmful organisms. On the other hand, it has to sort out and disarm all defensive cells that could accidentally attack the body’s own organs or tissue.
If the immune system is not able to perform this second task at an optimal level, painful inflammation can be the result.
Immune cells that could attack the own body are normally rejected and destroyed. In case some of these aggressive protection cells should survive, the body has an "anti-aggression unit" of sorts. These supervising cells are called "regulatory T cells" (T because they originate from the thymus).
This "peacekeeping force" is responsible for keeping in check the cells of the immune system that would like to attack the body’s own tissue.
A group of researchers from Germany’s National Genome Research Network has found out how these activists can be detected among the regulatory T cells and how they do their job.
Page 2: In an experiment, the "anti-aggression" T cells manage to stop the destructiveness of the defense cells.
