Researchers Discover Blue Prints Showing Immunological Memory

By Petrina Smith
Friday, 21 November, 2014

Research showing how immunity-protecting cells band together and create pathways, or ‘immunological memory’ could lead to more specific and improved vaccination strategies.

A key feature of our immune response to virus infection is the ability to establish immunological memory once the infection is controlled. Immunological memory is where the body remembers being infected with a disease for the first time, and redeploys immune defences much more rapidly on being infected again.

To create this memory, the body releases a specialised subset of white blood cells called killer T cells which persist for the lifetime of an individual. These killer T cells limit the spread of infectious agents by recognising and killing infectious cells.

The findings identified how particular immune defense responses are initiated and maintained in response to infection. This information will allow researchers to tailor new vaccines, especially for infections where effective vaccines do not exist.

Lead researcher Professor Stephen Turner from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University’s Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity said these findings will lead to more specific and improved vaccination strategies.

“While we know that immunological memory is the reason why vaccines can be effective against some infections, we have little idea about the precise molecular pathways that program effective immunological memory that protects us against future disease,” he said.

“We have generated molecular maps that allow us to trace how the thousands of different genes expressed by memory killer T cells are networked together and promote effective immunological memory in killer T cells.

“By being able to build these molecular maps within immune cells, we now have a blueprint for what an effective memory T cell looks like at a molecular level.”

This research was led by the Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity at the University of Melbourne researchers in collaboration with the Walter and Eliza Hall Insitute, the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Doherty Institute and Canberra University.