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Surprising Cells Stymie Sepsis
from ScienceNOW Daily News
Sepsis isn't just one of those old-time diseases that people used to die from before the discovery of antibiotics. It's still a major killer. Now, a new study shows that immune cells known as B cells forestall sepsis in mice, a discovery that may help researchers devise better treatments for the illness.
Each year, up to 1 million people in the United States fall victim to sepsis, a runaway infection coupled with bodywide inflammation. Despite antibiotics and other treatments, about 25% of sepsis patients die, notes infectious disease researcher Steven Opal of Brown University, who wasn't involved with the study. "Sepsis is a huge problem that we've had great difficulty solving," he says.
At first glance, B cells don't look like part of the solution. Their most familiar job is to pump out defensive proteins called antibodies. Immunologist Filip Swirski of Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues discovered the cells' involvement in sepsis by accident. Swirski has been probing the role of immune cells called macrophages in cardiovascular disease. He and his colleagues were trying to pin down the cells that manufacture granulocyte macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF). This protein exerts a big influence on white blood cells, spurring some of them to mature and switching on pathogen-fighters such as neutrophils. Swirski says that researchers thought that macrophages or other non-B cells were the source of GM-CSF. Yet in mice, the team found, most of the GM-CSF-making cells in the spleen were B cells.
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