Artistic rendering of the surface of a human dendritic cell WIKIMEDIA, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTHUntil now, much of human fetal immune development has been a black box. But a new study, published today (June 14) in Nature, reveals that dendritic cells appear in human fetuses early in the second trimester of pregnancy. These cells likely function to suppress an immune reaction to cells from the mother, the researchers found.
This study “extends our understanding of the ways in which the human immune system develops in utero,” says Mike McCune, an HIV researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who did not participate in the work.
For the study, immunology researcher Florent Ginhoux of A*STAR in Singapore teamed up with Jerry Chan, a clinician at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore who uses experimental gene and cell therapies to treat disease in the womb. “One of the main hurdles and obstacles for in utero therapies is that there is a chance of rejection by the fetus,” says Ginhoux. We needed to “find a window of opportunity [by asking], when does the fetal system mature?”
Ginhoux, Chan, and colleagues collected fetal tissue from clinically indicated ...
