Deficient immune cells implicated in TB disease progression

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Nearly a quarter of the world’s population is estimated to be infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb), the pathogen that causes tuberculosis, but less than 15 percent of infected individuals develop the disease.

A study published May 24 in Nature Immunology by investigators from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard offers insights into the immune system that may help explain why some people have latent infections and others get sick.

In collaboration with Socios En Salud, (a part of Partners In Health based in Peru), researchers looked at a type of immune cell called memory T cells from 259 Peruvian individuals who were participating in a long-term program to monitor the progression of TB in people who were found to have latent infections.

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