A potential fountain of youth for the immune system
05/25/2022 - In old age, the performance of the immune system decreases, and older people are more susceptible to infections. Research teams from Würzburg and Freiburg have now discovered an approach that could be used to slow down this process. The corona pandemic has made it clear: Older people are more susceptible to infections, suffer from more severe infectious diseases than young people, and they take significantly longer to recover. In fact, the capacity of the human immune system decreases continuously from around the age of 60. The reason for this is known: "So-called T-lymphocytes play a central role in the recognition of pathogens and the protection against infections," explains Professor Dominic Grün, holder of the Chair of Computational Biology of Spatial Biomedical Systems at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) and member of the Würzburg Max Planck Research Group for Systems Immunology. T lymphocytes are part of the acquired immune system. They develop mainly in the early years of life in the thymus, a small lymphoid organ located in the thorax behind the breastbone.
