Good news for the human immune system: researchers from MedUni Vienna’s Departments of Dermatology and Surgery have managed to ascribe an immunological memory function to a subset of cytotoxic NK cells, which have hitherto been regarded as antigen-non-specific.
The researchers found under the leadership of Georg Stary, who is also Co-Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases and affiliated with the CeMM (Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences) that around one third of all human liver NK cells can remember viruses and therefore respond specifically to them.
