Cell biology: Taking dendritic cells into medicine

The medical importance of a key component of the immune system is reviewed in this week’s Nature. Dendritic cells (DCs) — named for their tree-like or dendritic shapes — have a pivotal role in antigen recognition and the generation of an immune response, and have the capacity to either prevent or encourage disease.

In the review, Ralph Steinman and Jacques Banchereau present some of the medical implications of DC biology that account for illness and suggest opportunities for prevention and therapy. They outline recent advances in DC biology, which concern the location, maturation and specialization of these cells, and discuss the relevance of DCs to a number of medical situations. In the settings of infection and cancer, microbes and tumours can exploit DCs to evade an immune response, but DC’s can also induce resistance to infection, which can be readily enhanced with DC-targeted vaccines. During allergy, autoimmunity and transplant rejection, DCs instigate unwanted responses that cause disease, but again can be harnessed to silence these conditions with novel therapies.

The authors suggest that further research should be aimed at these key players in disease development, which represent an unavoidable target in the design of future treatments.