USUALLY the body’s best friend, white blood cells sometimes trigger autoimmune disease by mistakenly attacking their own tissue. Now the master cells that stop this happening have been identified, paving the way for new treatments for diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.
Mouse experiments confirm what immunologists have long suspected: the immune system is kept in check by regulatory T-cells, which patrol the body and stop ordinary T-cells going berserk. Without the regulators, ordinary T-cells attack the body’s own organs (Nature Immunology, DOI: 10.1038/ni1428).
“The extent to which regulatory T-cells normally suppress autoimmunity was unknown before our study,” says Alexander Rudensky, head of the team at…
