Question: Have you discovered any patterns in the in the cells in the immune system that tells you more about viruses of old age?

Carolyn Nielsen answered on 18 Nov 2015:

Hi!

Great question. The volunteers who donated blood to my study range in age from 20 to 77-years old. So what I can do is look at characteristics of the immune cells that seem to be associated with cytomegalovirus infections, compared to those that seem to be associated with ageing. Quite a bit is known about this already, but I confirmed that I saw the same patterns and trends. For example, there is a protein that can be on the surface of natural killer cells (the main type of immune cell I study) called CD57. We don’t know what it does, but we know that older people have more CD57+ natural killer cells. But we also know cytomegalovirus-infected people have more CD57+ natural killer cells.. so it can be confusing to figure out what is the cause.

Anyway, the main thing I have discovered (and got published this year 🙂 ) is that the CD57+ natural killer cells in cytomegalovirus-infected people respond worse to vaccines than CD57+ natural killer cells of uninfected people of the same age. Now we’re trying to understand how the virus makes the cells less responsive like that!