Main Category: Immune System / Vaccines
Also Included In: Cancer / Oncology; HIV / AIDS
Article Date: 25 Jul 2013 - 0:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Clearest ever pictures of immune cells could help treat cancers and HIV
Immunity has never looked so good. Scientists in the UK recently released images that provide the clearest snapshot of how white blood immune cells attack viral infections and tumors. They are hopeful that these clearer pictures will provide important insights into how diseases can be treated.
White blood cells are the fighters of the body, tackling infections and cancers on our behalf. But when a research team from the University of Manchester used an improved process to view them, the images revealed how the cells change the way their surface molecules are arranged when a protein involved with cancers and viruses is activated.
And the images are something akin to science fiction. The proteins at the surface of the immune cells do not appear to be evenly distributed, but rather, they cluster, producing an image that resembles stars in a galaxy.
Professor Daniel Davis, director of research at the Manchester Collaborative Centre for Inflammation Research (MCCIR), told Medical News Today that before their breakthrough, normal light microscopes were limited in the images they produced because of the way light travels by bending around obstacles. The new microscopes he and his team used were able to employ computer technology and optics to break that barrier.
The image produced by scientists shows, for the first time, the cluster patterns of proteins on the surface of white blood immune cells. Source: MCCIR
They used super-resolution fluorescence microscopy in order to view the immune cells in their lab, and their results were recently published in Science Signalling.
By studying how the proteins change on immune cell surfaces at a nano scale, Davis and his team are able to gain a better understanding of how our immune systems work. He notes that this could give them ideas for how to develop disease-fighting drugs in the future. He told MNT:
"Rather than study one specific disease here, we investigated how immune cells respond to a particular protein that is found on many types of cancer cells or virus-infected cells. This protein is not found on the surface of normal healthy cells, but when a cell becomes cancerous or gets infected with some types of viruses, this protein gets put up on the surface for immune cells to see that there is a problem."
Davis added that these new imaging improvements are leading to unanticipated medical discoveries. For example, he and his team recently discovered new aspects of how HIV "uses membrane nanotubes to spread."
Though he notes that the road between where they are now with research and where they hope to arrive with new medicine is quite long, he's hopeful about where they're heading.
"We are, for example, trying to apply this new imaging technology to look at human lung samples with a view to understanding respiratory infections, asthma and so on," he said.
We may need to wait for new medicines to be developed as a result of the new images, but we can now marvel at the pictures Davis and his team have produced.
Written by Marie Ellis
Copyright: Medical News Today
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'Clearest ever pictures of immune cells could help treat cancers and HIV'
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