In a first-of-its-kind research breakthrough, a team of scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has analyzed and described what they call the “mosquito effect,” which sheds light on how certain pathogens, such as cancerous tumor cells, can outwit the body’s immune system.
Just as mosquitoes ingest their host’s blood, the immune system’s T cells incorporate cytoplasmic material from tumors into their own cytoplasm. While it has long been known that many kinds of cells can transfer cellular material from one to another, the transfer of the cytoplasm has never been observed in T cells. Subsequent single-cell RNA (scRNA) sequencing shows that cytoplasm from tumor cells alters the machinery responsible for protein coding in the host T cell. The research, reported recently in the journal Frontiers in Immunology, is a major step forward in understanding how tumors can successfully evade the immune system, and thus a step toward more effective treatments.
To make the discovery, Pobezinsky and his team, including first author Kaito Hioki, graduate student in the MCB program at UMass Amherst, and Elena Pobezinskaya, research assistant professor also in veterinary and animal sciences at UMass and co-senior author of the paper, engineered tumor cells to produce an ultrabright fluorescent protein called ZsGreen. They then introduced the green-glowing tumor cells into a mouse model. After eight days, the model’s tumor-infiltrating immune cells were gathered and analyzed using state-of-the-art equipment in the Flow Cytometry lab at UMass Amherst’s Institute for Applied Life Sciences. Read more