Most of the time, the T-cells are"naïve"—mustered out of duty and resting. But when they recognize foreign antigens after bumping into them, they suddenly wake up, turn into killer T-cells and attack whatever the pathogen may be, from the sniffles to COVID, or even cancer. After the killer T-cells have won their battle, most of them die.
This is one of the mechanisms behind how vaccines work: infect the body with a weakened dose of a pathogen—say, the chicken pox virus—and the memory cells will remember what that virus looks like, turn into killer T-cells, annihilate the virally infected cells and then transform back into memory cells, waiting for the next time the chicken pox virus shows up.
"What we've discovered," says Pobezinsky,"is that a tiny piece of miRNA, let-7, which has been handed down thesince the dawn of animal life, is highly expressed in memory cells, and that the more let-7 a cell has, the less chance that it will be tricked by cancerous tumor cells, and the greater chance it has of turning into a memory cell." If the memory cell isn't tricked by the cancer, then it can fight and, crucially, remember what that cancerous cell looks like.
"Memory cells can live for a very long time," adds Pobezinskaya."They possess stem-cell-like features and can live for 70 years." "We are very excited, not only about the fundamental insights this research has provided, but also the translational impact it could have on next generation immunotherapies," says lead author Alexandria Wells, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cancer Research Institute who completed the work as part of her Ph.D. training at UMass Amherst.
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