Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, Oncologist and Director of the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai in New-York is an expert of tissue-resident immune cells. Here, she comes back on her discovery of a lineage of tissue-resident macrophages, which is independent of the monocyte lineage, and which may play a critical role in tissue homeostasis.
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One big discovery that my lab has made, is the discovery of these tissue-resident macrophages that develop independently of circulating monocytes. So what we found is that there is a lineage of macrophages that is recruited to tissue prior to birth, and then is maintained locally.
Those macrophages are going to be localized in specific niches in the tissue, and we believe are absolutely critical for the maintenance of tissue growth or tissue health. But we still do not capture the subtleties of all of these lineages. We know a lot of phenotypes, we still don’t know exactly where it’s located and we don’t know exactly the type of interaction it has with all the components of the organ, including the nerves the vessels, the stroma. We know about its interactions with the other immune cell, this is very easily studied. But we don’t know [about interactions with other cell types] because we cannot reconstruct those tissues perfectly well ex-vivo. And I think this is going to be really the big focus of the future of regenerative disease. Understanding how these niches really impact organ survival, and organ homeostasis.