New insight into how immune cells are formed
Allergy and asthma affect a high p ercentage of the population. Mast cells are specialised immune cells that play an important role not only in these conditions but also in other diseases such as mastocytosis, a haematologic disease involving an increased number of mast cells. It has been commonly understood that the growth factor stem cell factor, which stimulates mast cell development, is essential for the formation of mast cells. Now researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University have shown that this is not the case. The researchers analysed mast cells and their progenitors in blood from patients with chronic myeloid leukemia, a disease of the blood. "When the patients were treated with the drug imatinib (Glivec), which blocks the effect of stem cell factor, the number of mature mast cells dropped, while the number of progenitor cells did not change. We were thus able to conclude that mast cell progenitors did not require stem cell factor," says Professor...