This article was written by Ben Bleasdale, MRC Policy Intern.
Last Monday saw the latest in the Academy’s series of Discussion Dinners, presented by Professor Gillian Griffiths FRS FMedSci.
Entitled ‘Killer T-cells: Keeping on target’, attendees were led through the microscope lens to explore the world of this key component of our immune system.
Killer T-cells, also known as Cytotoxic T-cells, are the assassins of the immune system. They are able to identify and destroy cells which have been infected by viruses, or are showing signs of becoming cancerous. All of this is achieved with astounding accuracy – selecting a single cell out of countless neighbours, which are left in peace.
This remarkable accuracy appears to be related to immunological synapses – tight connections that Killer T-cells make with their targets, which appear to focus their lethal abilities onto only those targets requiring attention.
Professor Griffiths’ work has studied the changes that occur inside the Killer T-cell as the synapse forms. Her hope is that developing this field will produce new ways to control these cellular assassins – using them to improve cancer treatments, and holding them back in autoimmune diseases where they operate out-of-control, killing healthy cells unnecessarily.
Sharing her research findings, including videos of cells attacking their targets, she was able to demonstrate how synapse formation sets in motion a dramatic change in the internal network of these cells. Her team have demonstrated how these changes are key to verifying the target at the synapse, and delivering the lethal blow only when everything matches.
She explained how her team had turned to human genetic diseases to piece together the complex chain of proteins that guide this process. Fusing this work with biochemical approaches has helped her make important contributions to both the fields of cell biology and immunology.
Professor Griffiths is currently Director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, and Professor of Cell Biology and Immunology at the University of Cambridge. She trained with Dr Cesar Milstein (MRC-LMB, Cambridge) and Prof Irv Weissman (Stanford) before starting her own lab at the Basel Institute for Immunology. She took up a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship first at UCL, and then at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford before moving to Cambridge as a Wellcome Trust Principal Fellow in 2007. She was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2005.
The presentation provided lively discussion over dinner, with particular interest in the process by which juvenile Cytotoxic T-cells develop their assassin abilities, and discussion of the complex interplay between different internal secretory compartments. Guests and the presenter all departed with plenty of food for thought.