Homing in on what's wearing out T cells
Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - 21:30
in Health & Medicine
When the T cells of your immune system are forced to deal over time with cancer or a chronic infection they become exhausted - less effective at attacking and destroying invaders. While the PD-1 protein pathway has long been implicated as a primary player in T cell exhaustion, a major question has been whether PD-1 actually directly causes exhaustion. A new paper seems to, at least partially, let PD-1 off the hook.