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Adding Insult to Injury: Improving the Regenerative Capacity of the Aged Thymus Following Clinically Induced Damage

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Thymus Transcriptome and Cell Biology

Abstract

T cell development in the thymus requires constant interactions between developing thymocytes and the surrounding resident stromal cells (TSCs). These functional, non-hematopoietic-derived cells are predominantly of epithelial origin and constitute 1% of total thymus cellularity. Thymic function and naïve T cell output are optimal in humans during the early years of life, but decline sharply after the first years of life and further after the onset of puberty, with progressive contraction of functional thymus tissue. The loss of thymic epithelial cells (TECs) eventually results in an altered microenvironment that affects normal T cell development, reducing naïve T cell output and contributing to the overall demise of immune functions. Other extrinsic factors that exacerbate the effects of thymic involution include cytoreductive conditioning regimes in the context of cancer treatments and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). In these scenarios, elderly patients are incapable of full immune recovery. With such complications present, we describe herein various preclinical approaches that could lead to potential new treatment strategies to restore thymic function and, more importantly, T-cell mediated immunity following clinically induced damage (Fig. 13.1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Program in Immunology, Clinical Research Division, and Immunotherapy Integrated Research Center, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, USA

    Jarrod Dudakov

  2. Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Michael L. Hun, Kahlia Wong & Ann P. Chidgey

  3. Department of Paediatrics and the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Georg Holländer

  4. MRC Functional Genomics Unit, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Georg Holländer

Authors
  1. Jarrod Dudakov
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  2. Michael L. Hun
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  3. Kahlia Wong
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  4. Georg Holländer
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  5. Ann P. Chidgey
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ann P. Chidgey .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Genetics and Molecular Biology, Department of Basic and Oral Biology, School of Dentistry of Ribeirão Preto, University of São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brazil

    Geraldo A. Passos

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Dudakov, J., Hun, M.L., Wong, K., Holländer, G., Chidgey, A.P. (2019). Adding Insult to Injury: Improving the Regenerative Capacity of the Aged Thymus Following Clinically Induced Damage. In: Passos, G. (eds) Thymus Transcriptome and Cell Biology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12040-5_13

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