A Bioinformatics Study of Impeded T Cell Ownership and Implications for Teaching and Research in the United States and Beyond
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Scientists once thought that each cell’s mitochondria were made by that cell itself, but researchers are increasingly finding that mitochondria can move from one cell to another. In the Petri dish, for example, cancer cells have been found to feed their insatiable appetite for energy by stealing healthy mitochondria from immune cells called T cells2.
The criteria used to get a promotion to a full professorship are extremely variable in different parts of the world. The authors suggest that this variability results in researchers from countries that value one type of metric being locked out of professor positions in others. They hope the database created in the study could help institutions adjust their hiring policies to create a more diverse science workforce.
J.R.B. is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of LUCA Science, Inc.; receives research support from LUCA Science and Edgewise Therapeutics; is a consultant for Columbus Instruments; has consulted for DeciBio within the past 12 months (discontinued); receives royalties from Springer Nature Group; is an inventor on technology licensed to Columbus Instruments with royalty rights; is an inventor on pending patent applications related to the treatment of metabolic diseases (63/625,555), allergic diseases (US20210128689A1) and mitochondria transfer (018984/US) assigned to Washington University in St. Louis; and is a co-founder of and holds equity in Symbiogenix, Inc.
The idea of cellular ownership of mitochondria is challenged by this.
“My first thought was that this sounds crazy, like science fiction. But they seem to have the data for it,” says Holden Maecker, an immunologist at Stanford University in California, who was not involved in the research. “This is potentially a totally new biology that we were not looking at.”
They showed thatinted TILs were less able to divide and more likely to commit suicide. In mice with cancer, TILs that had imbibed alien mitochondria showed signs of T cell exhaustion — the loss of cancer-killing potential.