New metabolic target in quest to control immune response

Results of the new study show that the immune responses of dendritic cells are fuelled by an intracellular storage of sugar as opposed to external sugar, where prior research has focused.

“By either enhancing or depleting this sugar warehouse within the cell, the hope would be that we could either influence or dampen immune reactions,” said  Professor Eyal Amiel, at the University of Vermont in the Department of Medical Laboratory and Radiation Science in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. “What we’re really in the business of is finding new switches to toggle to that effect and this finding provides us with a new regulatory target that regulates immune activity.”

The finding gives immunologists a key piece of new information to better understand how the early part of the bioenergetics of a dendritic cell immune response is generated. This is especially significant given the importance of timing when it comes to immune response and the speed at which the switch of inflammation can be either increased or suppressed.

Prof Amiel and his colleagues impaired the ability of dendritic cells to access the internal warehouse of sugar, the cells were less effective at stimulating an immune response in a number of measurable ways. “The really exciting thing is we believe our findings likely extend to other cells of the immune system and are not dendritic cell-specific,” said Prof Amiel.

In a previous paper in Nature Immunology, Prof Amiel and Professor Bart Everts, at the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, found that the early consumption of glucose is vital to the activation of cells, in terms of the production and secretion of proteins that are essential to the cells’ immune function.

Prof Amiel has started conducting new research on mice only with deficiencies in glycogen synthesis only in dendritic cells to measure the impact of blocking the creation of the intracellular glycogen supply on the longer-term immunological capacity of those cells.

“We know that if we prevent their ability to use glycogen during that early window there are long-term consequences for the abilities of those dendritic cells to stimulate T-Cells, even hours and days after the fact.”