A New Driver of Immune Diseases: The Many Faces of B Cells

Armed with the new vision that B cells, acting via cytokines, trigger other cells, including T cells, to cause disease, Prof. Fillatreau wants to make more targeted therapies possible by better characterizing the members of the B cell family. This is critically important because although some of the cytokine-producing cells may drive disease, it is also known that others have a protective function. Working with multiple sclerosis patients in the clinical lab, his goal is to identify markers for the different B cell subsets, to avoid depleting the helpful ones when eliminating the undesirable ones. Monitoring patients’ B cell populations could help predict who will benefit from B cell depletion therapy, too. He will also investigate what the disease-causing T cells do when their driver B cells are more active, or when protective B cells are less active, as is the case in multiple sclerosis. He believes a new group of pathogenic T cells might emerge in such a case, something no one has looked for before.

As the project advances, Prof. Fillatreau will build on this new knowledge of B cells to understand their role in allergy, too. The prevalence of chronic allergies is on the rise – the world health organization predicts that 50% of the world population will suffer from at least one allergy by 2050 – and B cells, via their cytokines, might also have a hand in their development. His objective is to develop a center devoted to opening eyes to the diverse and unexplored roles played by B cells and to creating innovative therapeutic tools for a host of immune conditions with a heavy impact on human health.

Scientific title : AXA Chair in Translational Immunology

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