Letters

T Cells

How It's Used

“Patients in the trial, whose cancer had progressed to the point where they had no other treatment options, underwent a procedure designed to ‘harvest’ so-called dendritic cells from their blood. Dendritic cells ‘teach’ other immune cells known as T cells to identify threats to the body.”

“A newspaper shouldn't take a reporter off a running story because of complaints from subjects if it doesn't find the complaints valid. But neither should a newspaper automatically defend this principle when it is neither material nor mission-critical…

“This wasn't a matter of a president leaning on a newspaper to back off a story of critical importance, but The Times's T cells didn't make the distinction.”

"While traditional vaccines prompt the body to create antibodies, [Dr. Sarah] Gilbert's vaccine boosts the number of the body's T-cells, another key part of the immune system. These can identify and destroy body cells that have been infected by a virus...

"Gilbert said: 'This is the first time anyone's tested if you can boost somebody's T-cell response to flu and, having done that, if it helps protect against getting flu. It's the first time anybody's done that in people.'

"Her results showed that the vaccine worked as planned. 'Fewer of the people who were vaccinated got flu than the people who weren't vaccinated,' said Gilbert. 'We did get an indication that the vaccine was protecting people, not only from the numbers of people who got flu but also from looking at their T-cells before we gave them flu. The people we vaccinated had T-cells that were more activated. The people we hadn't vaccinated had T-cells as well but they were in a resting state so they would probably have taken longer to do anything. The volunteers we vaccinated had T-cells that were activated, primed and ready to kill. There were more T-cells in people we vaccinated and they were more activated.' Gilbert has now sent her results to a scientific journal."

Links