Cell Rep: Amazing! Immune cell action is different between first and late pregnancy!

, June 29, 2020 /PRNewswire-/
Biovalley -- Preventing miscarriages, stillbirths and other pregnancy complications, including premature birth, is one of the sacred tasks in the face of the serious and mysterious medical challenges that doctors and researchers are trying to overcome"We don't know what causes miscarriage or premature birth at the cellular and molecular levels, mainly because we don't know how the pregnancy works," said Sing Sing Way, M.D., director of the Center for Inflammation and Tolerance at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center,"
Way and his colleagues are part of a group of scientists and doctors who are looking for answers to these basic questions that have a huge impact on health and scienceTheir goal is to design improved treatments to stem the tide of what remains a serious and deep-rooted public health crisisPhoto Source: Cincinnati Children'sWay's research focused on changes in the immune system during pregnancy and immune disorders associated with pregnancy complicationsThe scientists used animal pregnancy models to assess variables of differences in human pregnancy outcomes, including the age of the mother, the geneticofparents, and the number of pregnanciesthe mother's immune system is altered during pregnancy to prevent the fetus from being rejected by the bodyThis is a delicate immune balance that, if destroyed, can lead to miscarriage or multiple miscarriagesUnfortunately, this balance is often disrupted by environmental exposure or physiological changes, which can lead to pregnancy complicationsWay's team now adds an important new question, reporting in Cell Reports that women's immune systems behave very differently during the first and second pregnanciesThis could lead to more personalized and effective treatment strategies, the researchers said"The effects of first and subsequent pregnancies are very different, and understanding these differences can improve thetherapy for unique immune disorders that occur in and after the first pregnancy," explains Way, the lead author of the study"
this study shows that the immune pathways that promote the health of the first pregnancy are different from the pathways that promote later pregnancythe authors discuss how pregnancy causes physiological exposure and is often re-exposed to the same type of antigen in an alien fetus expressed by a developing fetusThese allogeneic antigens interact directly with the mother's immune systemThey point out that the consequences of pregnancy varyresearchers found evidence of heterogenic immunity and the expansion of the tolerant epithetTheir data showed that fetal-specific mother CD8-T cells were accumulated in the early stages of pregnancy, and mothers remembered their babies in an immune manner because they persisted as an active memory pool after childbirthcells called memory T cells express two proteins, PD-1 and lag3, reminding cells to again be immune to the developing fetus during subsequent pregnanciesBut the molecular interruption of neutralized the expression of these proteins can lead to activation of fetal-specific CD8-T cells, leading to selective abortion in subsequent pregnancies, which does not occur during the first pregnancy, said Jeremy Kinder, the study's lead author and a research assistant at the Way Lab team(BioValleyBioon.com)reference:Immune System Works Differently First and LaterJeremy MKinder et al.
CD8 plus T Cell Functional Exhaustion Overrides Press - Induc Ed Fetal Antigen AlloimmunizationCell Reports (2020) DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2020.107784 .