Mirco Julian Friedrich, Postdoctoral Fellow (EMBO fellowship) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shared a post on LinkedIn about a recent article he and his colleagues co-authored, adding:
“What if we could keep the immune system young as we age?
What if mRNA therapeutics could do far more than vaccines?
Today we report in Nature Magazine a strategy to transiently support the aging immune system by turning the liver into a temporary factory for immune signals.
Accompanying Nature News coverage:
The problem we are going after: As we age (and in many clinical settings), the immune system loses speed, breadth, and robustness, leading to infections, vaccine failure, and weaker anti-tumor responses. Can we restore the signals that T cells, our most important immune cells depend on, in a controlled and reversible way?
What we did (in aged mice):
- Mapped immune ‘support cues’ that decline with age
- Delivered a twice-weekly cocktail of LNP-formulated mRNAs encoding DLL1, FLT3L, and IL-7 to hepatocytes
- Replenished T cells and improved immune function – boosting vaccine responses and restoring anti-tumor immunity (including synergy with immune checkpoint blockade)
- Importantly: the effects were reversible after dosing stopped, and we did not see evidence of breaking self-tolerance or inducing autoimmunity.
Why I am especially excited:
We are now aiming to translate this into a first-in-human clinical trial led by my team at DKFZ German Cancer Research Center and University Hospital Heidelberg starting with the most vulnerable population I treat as a physician: hematological cancer patients who have received stem cell transplants or CAR-T cell therapy and are especially prone to severe infections, as my good colleague and friend Kai Rejeski and his team have recently pointed out in Nature Medicine.
I am particularly grateful to Feng Zhang at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the lead author of this study, for his outstanding mentorship and for creating the intellectual space in which this work could grow.”
Title: Transient hepatic reconstitution of trophic factors enhances aged immunity
Authors: Mirco J. Friedrich, Julie Pham, Jiakun Tian, Hongyu Chen, Jiahao Huang, Niklas Kehl, Sophia Liu, Blake Lash, Fei Chen, Xiao Wang, Rhiannon K. Macrae, Feng Zhang
Read the Full Article on Nature
More posts featuring Mirco Julian Friedrich.
