STAT+: Mystery of allergic memory gets closer to answer: a rare group of B cells
Working with the cells of people with peanut allergies, researchers identify a "memory population" of immune cells that lead to allergic reactions.
Maria Curotto de Lafaille’s lab was trying to make human plasma cells in a dish. These weren’t just run-of-the-mill cells, though. The team was vying for something specific: plasma cells that churn out immunoglobulin E (IgE), the antibody that drives allergic reactions.
It was the mid-2010s, and from a research bench at the Immunology Network of A*STAR in Singapore, one of Lafaille’s postdocs, Sriram Narayanan, was plopping donated human B cells into a culture dish with some proteins, hoping the white blood cells would transform over a few days of incubation.
But so far, the experiment wasn’t going well.
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