Media Advisory

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

The NIH-supported discovery could provide a new target for anti-TB drugs, vaccines.

What

A class of immune cells called innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) is the body's initial defense against tuberculosis (TB), according to a report published online today in Nature.. Stimulating this response could be a new approach to the development of TB treatments and vaccines, which causes more deaths around the world than any other infectious disease. The research was funded in part by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a component of the National Institutes of Health. It was conducted by scientists from the University of Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis, in collaboration with scientists from the Africa Health Research Institute in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and other institutions.

Identified only in the past decade, CALs can initiate non-specific pathogen-specific rapid responses and also provide protective immune responses directed against specific pathogens. In this study, the researchers observed that in people infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the bacterium causing TB, a subset of ILCs transferred from the blood to the lungs, where TB infections often develop.

The investigators also tracked the activity of ILCs in several animal models. In mice with intact immune systems, ILCs targeted infected lung tissues and used messenger molecules to recruit immune system scavenger cells, macrophages, to form protective granulomas or small areas of inflammation to to remove the infection. Mice lacking functional ILCs, however, had low levels of macrophages in lung tissue and poor immune control of their TB. Human and animal data have led the researchers to conclude that CILs play an early, crucial and previously unrecognized role in immunizing against TB.

Increasingly, Mtb is resistant to conventional antibiotic treatments. Although Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine can prevent Mtb infection in infants and young children, no vaccine is approved for the prevention of tuberculosis in older children and adults. Because ILCs appear to protect early in the disease, the researchers suggest that probing the new pathway described could lead to new approaches to treating and preventing TB.

article

A fiery et al. Inborn lymphoid group 3 cells mediate early protective immunity against tuberculosis. Nature DOI: 10.1038 / s41586-019-1276-2 (2019).

who

Alison Deckhut-Augustine, Ph.D., Head of the Immunology Fundamental Division of the Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation Division of NIAID, and Nancy Vazquez-Maldonado, Ph.D., program officer in the same branch, are available to comment.

Contact

To schedule interviews, please contact Judith Lavelle at (301) 402-1663, [email protected].

NIAID conducts and supports research – at NIH, in the United States, and around the world – to investigate the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases and to develop better ways to prevent, diagnose and treat these diseases. NIAID press releases, fact sheets and other documents are available on the NIAID website.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH):
The NIH, the country's medical research agency, has 27 institutes and centers and is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the lead federal agency that leads and supports basic, clinical and translational medical research. She studies causes, treatments and treatments for common and rare diseases. For more information on NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.

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