Immune System Remembers Viruses It Has Never Been Exposed To

STANFORD UNIVERSITY, CALIFORNIA, USA. A group of researchers were able to discover in a recent study that the human body’s T-cells in the immune system has the ability to fight viruses even if the patient has not been exposed to that particular virus. The human body’s T-cells are white blood cells being sent by the immune system to fight any virus that invades the body. Once the T-cells have successfully defeated the virus, some stay around and it turns into memory cells.

These memory cells reduce the time to kill the same kind of virus by remembering it the next it attacks. It has always been believed that one has to be exposed to that certain type of virus in order for the T-cells to have something to remember. That way, it can effectively defend the body to the next strain of attackers of the same kind.

Well, that was the case until recently when Mark Davis and his colleagues at the Stanford University in California made a research with the help of 26 volunteers from the Stanford Blood Center. The volunteers were screened for diseases and they had to make sure that they have never been infected with cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex virus or even HIV.

Despite the fact they the volunteers were cleared from all these viruses, the team of researchers found out that all the blood samples had T-cells that were actually tailored to these viruses. On top of that, they also found out that 50 percent of these cells were actually memory cells.

It has also been concluded that the human body’s T-cells have the capacity to remember a virus even if they haven’t been exposed to it yet. That is because each virus is just a collection of peptides to a T-cell. Although there are so many different microbes, they could have similar structures that could actually confuse the T-cells. Currently, Mark Davis and his team of researchers are really excited about potentially finding unexpected correlations as their study progresses.