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Immunosenescence comes of age
Author(s) -
Pawelec Graham
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
embo reports
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.584
H-Index - 184
eISSN - 1469-3178
pISSN - 1469-221X
DOI - 10.1038/sj.embor.7400922
Subject(s) - immunosenescence , biology , computational biology , evolutionary biology , virology , genetics , immune system
The Symposium on Aging Research in Immunology: The Impact of Genomics took place on 4 and 5 September 2006 in Paris, France, and was organized by B. Grubeck‐Loebenstein.![][1] Ageing of the immune system (immunosenescence) contributes to the increased susceptibility of the elderly to infectious disease and to the poor outcome of vaccination. Defence against pathogens is compromised mainly because of changes in adaptive immunity mediated by T and B lymphocytes; however, all components of the immune system are affected (Fig 1). Dissecting the crucial alterations responsible for dysfunctional immunity in old age will facilitate the development of rational interventions to reconstitute appropriate immune function. Given the increasing proportion of elderly people in most countries and their disproportionate consumption of health‐care resources, this issue is rapidly gaining in importance. The meeting, which was dedicated solely to studies of immunosenescence, filled two days with the ‘A to Z’ of immunity, covering topics ranging from development to senescence, innate immunity to adaptive immunity, and genes to environments, in organisms ranging from mice to monkeys and humans. Understanding and eventually modulating immune dysfunction in the elderly now beckons.Figure 1. Human immunoageing trajectory. All compartments are affected by age. Ag, antigen; CMV, cytomegalovirus; HSC, haematopoietic stem cells; NK, natural killer cells; TCR, T‐cell receptor.The cells of the immune system turn over rapidly and therefore need constant replacement from the pool of haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). If the HSCs themselves aged, it would compromise all downstream events that depend on their integrity, including production of immune cells and subsequent immune responsiveness (Rando, 2006). Evidence for age‐associated alterations in the ability of HSCs to reconstitute the haematopoietic system of an animal derives from findings of increased self‐renewal with age, resulting in an expansion of the HSC pool size even when transplanted into young animals (D. Rossi, Stanford, … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif