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Unconventional T cells: a major component of the human immune system with untapped therapeutic potential

Published on March 30, 2023   45 min

A selection of talks on Immunology

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0:00
Thank you for the invitation to give a talk in this series. My name is Professor Dale Godfrey. I work in the department of microbiology and immunology at the Peter Doherty Institute at the University of Melbourne. This talk's entitled unconventional T-Cells: A major component of the human immune system with untapped therapeutic potential.
0:21
The talk is really intended to be a bit of a primer about three different classes of unconventional T-cells. There's a huge amount of literature about these cells and I'm not going to be able to go into great detail, but it hopefully will represent a good starting point to get an understanding of some of the complexity of human T lymphocytes that extends beyond your classical CD4 and CD8 T-cells.
0:47
Just to gently introduce these cells in the context of the immune system, a major component in the immune system, are the lymphocytes and these cells have antigen receptors. Lymphocytes recognize infections based on foreign molecules, which we know of as antigens. Each lymphocyte carries a unique antigen receptor. There are so many different antigen receptors that theoretically there's up to 10 to the 18 different types of antigen receptor. This means that the lymphocytes are capable of recognizing the universe of possible antigens, essentially. Now, there are two different broad classes of lymphocytes. There are the B-cells and T-cells. They both have antigen receptors but the receptors are different. B-cells have antigen receptors made out of surface immunoglobulin, which is basically surface antibody. When these cells are activated, they turn into plasma cells and they begin to secrete those receptors as antibodies, which is what we all have flowing in our blood. Then there are the T-cell receptors, these are different from antibodies. They membrane-bound only, they are not secreted, but they also are highly diverse and give the T-cells the ability to recognize the universe of different types of antigens that T-cells might encounter.

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Unconventional T cells: a major component of the human immune system with untapped therapeutic potential

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