Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
In this Year in Review, Donna Farber discusses some of the exciting breakthroughs that occurred in the T cell field in 2019, highlighting the therapeutic implications for our understanding of T cell function in infection, allergy, inflammatory disease and cancer.
The design of vaccines that induce broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) to HIV is extremely challenging. Two reports now demonstrate strategies for the design of immunogens that can induce the production of bnAb precursors and guide these towards the acquisition of improbable mutations.
Organoid technology has emerged as a powerful tool to maintain epithelial cells in a near-native state that can be used to better understand the interactions between epithelial cells and the immune system in tissue development, homeostasis, infection and cancer.
Immune cells and neural cells interact in numerous tissues and organs and can have local and far-reaching physiological effects. Understanding these intimate bidirectional interactions is providing insight into the gut–brain axis, as well as the maternal gut–fetal brain axis.
Overexpression of JUN by CAR T cells renders them resistant to exhaustion and improves tumour control in mouse models, including of solid tumours and of tumours with low levels of antigen expression.
Here, Marco Colonna and Simone Brioschi highlight several key papers from 2019 that used single-cell and single-nucleus RNA sequencing to provide exciting insights into the neuro-immune interactions that occur in the healthy and diseased brain.
The authors discuss the formation of two main ‘walls’ of B cell memory to protect against pathogen reinfection. The first wall comprises high-affinity antibodies produced by long-lived plasma cells, while the second wall is formed by memory B cells.
Clearing away dead cells — a process known as efferocytosis — is crucial for normal tissue homeostasis and is impaired in several pathological processes. This Review describes new insights into how efferocytes deal with the engulfed dead cell cargo, how efferocytosis supports the resolution of inflammation and how this understanding is informing new therapeutic strategies.
Studies in the field of inflammation in 2019 have highlighted a counterbalancing homeostatic function for the glycolytic metabolite lactate, which is produced in hypoxic conditions, such as in tumours and chronic inflammation. Lionel Ivashkiv describes how lactate suppresses inflammatory signalling pathways and regulates macrophage polarization.
Therapies based on adoptive cellular transfer of regulatory T (Treg) cells are currently undergoing clinical trials for autoimmune diseases, graft-versus-host disease and the prevention of transplant rejection. This Review provides an overview of Treg cell biology and discusses the latest approaches to enhance Treg cells for therapeutic purposes.
In 2019, single-cell sequencing studies provided important insight into the diverse gene expression profiles of tissue macrophages, and new systems for specifically deleting macrophages were reported. A lactate ‘timer’ that controls inflammatory responses in macrophages was also described.
This Review by Handel and colleagues focuses on how simulation modelling can be used to interrogate the immune system. The authors provide an overview of different model types and encourage immunologists to build their own models.
Recent studies using single-cell genomic technologies and in vivo fate mapping have shown that thymic epithelial cells are far more heterogeneous than previously thought, comprising multiple subpopulations with distinct molecular and functional characteristics.
Single-cell sequencing studies in 2019 have led to exciting discoveries relevant to the roles of the immune system in development, homeostasis and disease.
Endogenous oxidized phospholipids can induce a hypermetabolic state in macrophages, involving both oxidative phosphorylation and aerobic glycolysis, that boosts the inflammatory response to lipopolysaccharide.
Activated CD8+ T cells adapt to glutamine blockade through upregulation of acetate metabolism, whereas cancer cells lack this flexibility and are highly susceptible to glutamine blockade.
