Innate Immunity, Neutrophils & Aging - The Hidalgo Lab at Yale School of Medicine

Transcript

• 00:05Neutrophil is a type of a innate immune cell.
• 00:08They have three main features.
• 00:10One is that they're very abundant.
• 00:12So they're the most abundant in human blood,
• 00:15in the bone marrow, that’s the most abundant of the immune cells.
• 00:17The second feature is they like to kill.
• 00:20So they, when they get activated, they eat and kill microbes,
• 00:24and the third property is that they live for a very short time.
• 00:28So they've being produced all the time.
• 00:35We study the innate immune system broadly,
• 00:37especially two types of cells.
• 00:39One is neutrophils and the other one are macrophages,
• 00:43which is another major component of innate immune system,
• 00:46and there's the realization that the immune system
• 00:49protects in a very broad sense of the term.
• 00:53So they protect not only by killing microbes
• 00:55but also by reinforcing barriers,
• 00:57by helping thermo regulate better when the specific challenges in temperature.
• 01:02So what we study is all these adaptations,
• 01:04the idea that they're there to make the body function better.
• 01:09And this brings things that are interesting, for example, with with aging.
• 01:13So if we don't have innate in the system, the body still works,
• 01:17the heart contracts, the lungs breathe,
• 01:20but they do that a little bit worse
• 01:22and when that accumulates over time, it can lead to the effects
• 01:26with what we know are chronic disease or aging.
• 01:29So there's a lot of ideas of of how the innate immune system optimizes these functions
• 01:34and that's what we're interested in.
• 01:35What do they do to to preserve that.
• 01:41We use a lot of imaging.
• 01:42So we look directly using microscopy.
• 01:45There are other ways of seeing molecules.
• 01:47We use a lot of flow cytometry.
• 01:49It's a way in which we can see proteins in the cells.
• 01:52We use a lot of transcriptomics single cell wall transcriptomics
• 01:56because they give us access to the inside of the nucleus
• 01:59and all these genes that are transcribed so we can get more and more resolution
• 02:04and generally we use this in the context of all the systems
• 02:08that we use, specific perturbations, aging, tumors, all those things
• 02:13that allow us to see how the cells respond
• 02:17to specific challenges.
• 02:22Eventually the purpose is to get into, you know, learning why we age,
• 02:27why the lung or the heart start function worse
• 02:30when the study sees or just over time.
• 02:33So can we use this massive army of cells?
• 02:36We're talking about billions of cells every day circulating and dying.
• 02:40So can we use this massive army inside our bodies to
• 02:45to improve how the body works, to improve the quality of the health of tissues,
• 02:50not only to prevent aging, but, for example, in the case
• 02:53when there's a disease and they tell, you know,
• 02:56the reason for this disease is not very well known.
• 02:59Can we use this to learn what is going on?
• 03:03So, diagnosis, prevention and treatment.