DENDRITIC CELLS

On Santorini

Do you know what dendritic cells are?  Well, don’t fret; neither did I until a few weeks ago, and I read lots more of this stuff than a normal person would.  Anyway, dendritic cells are part of the mammalian immune system; the outer defenses, so to speak.  They are stationed at places where bad guys are most likely to try to get in; nose, throat, etc.  When they encounter such a bad guy they devour it, break it into pieces, and display these pieces on their surface.  These pieces, known as antigens, alert the T cells as to what to search out and destroy.

Well, people at Lund University, in Sweden, have figured out how to reprogram ordinary skin cells into functional dendritic cells.  They also have learned how to alert these new dendritic cells to specific “enemies” – possibly cancer cells.  Cancer cells are wily devils; they tend to mutate so rapidly that they can “hide” from some therapies, even immunotherapy.  Somehow this new technique can circumvent this trick.  To find out how you’ll just have to read the news release.

https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/watch-a-code-for-reprogramming-immune-sentinels

and then explain it to me.