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My name is Lisa Spencer,
and I've been asked to speak today about eosinophil functions in allergic diseases.
0:08
I've broken this talk down into two parts.
In the first part, we'll talk about an introduction to eosinophils.
This is really just an overview.
It's not a comprehensive overview,
but we'll touch upon things like the morphology and development.
We'll look at tissue distribution at baseline,
and also their recruitment into allergic diseases,
and key mediators of priming, activation, and survival.
The point here is really not to provide a comprehensive overview of these styles,
but rather to try to highlight some of those key mediators that would help give
a perspective and a rationale behind some of the emerging therapeutics.
Really the main focus of what we'll talk about today is
this idea of effector functions of eosinophils in allergic diseases.
Traditionally, this has really been more of
an effector end-stage cell, type of a thought.
This is the traditional paradigm.
But what I hope to share with you today is that this paradigm is really evolving.
Instead of just being strictly an end-stage effector cells,
these eosinophils are really involved in many more multifaceted,
nuanced aspects of allergic diseases.
In addition, we'll spend a few minutes at the end to
talk about some newer data that really talks about
the possibility that eosinophils are actually contributing to
allergic diseases even in the absence of an intact cell,
so we'll term these "postmortem contributions."
1:26
Discussing eosinophil morphology, what you'll see here
is a typical staining of an eosinophil in a blood smear.
Now this is a human eosinophil.
If this were a mouse eosinophil,
the nucleus would look more like a doughnut shape.
What you first notice is,
of course, the bi-lobed nucleus,
and also these very bright,
pink stained granule or eosin-loving granules.
These granules really pull up this eosin dye or bind to this eosin dye very readily.
When you compare these granulocytes to other granulocytes, for example,
neutrophils on the top or mast cells on the bottom image there,
you can see that the pink granules of the eosinophils are really distinct.
This eosin affinity is distinctive for the eosinophils,
and this is where they get their name, eosinophil or eosin-loving.
