Assoc. Prof. Ma. Jennifer R.

Tiburcio,MSMT
Department of Med Tech
UST Faculty of Pharmacy
 Tommy T cell is a biodetective

His job is to patrol the human body

investigating suspicious characters

Think of the cells in the human body

as shops on a city street

Billion and trillions of police detectives like Tommy T cell are driving
by all the time looking in all the shop windows for something
unusual going on.
 Each T cell is trained to find one and only one type of criminal.
Tommy is also known as Helper T-cell, part of the body’s immune
system, but you can think of him as a cop

As Tommy cruises through the blood

and tissue he meets a
macrophage – a specialized cell
that’s like a garbage truck in the body

Macrophages go around
collecting bits of your
own living and dead cells
They find parts of invading viruses and bacteria, dust, pollen and
any junk that’s floating around

They stick pieces of this garbage

on their outside surfaces in
special places where detectives
like Tommy can see them

Tommy has a unique Y-shaped

spikes all over his surface
called receptor sites that
recognize one kind of garbage

(In 1983, Tak Mak discovered these T cell receptors)

Tommy’s got about 5000 receptor sites and each one is exactly
the same. No other T cell has spikes like Tommy’s

His are specially designed to

fit a tiny bit of protein from
a virus that causes colds

Tommy tries his receptors on

the macrophage, but nothing
happens, so he moves on

The whole thing takes less than a second

 As Tommy floats along he remembers his days years ago
at the body’s Police Academy, the thymus, where he learned
how to tell foreign invaders from good cells that belong to the body

The thymus is fist-sized gland

located just above the heart. It is bigger
and more active in babies than in adults

In the first years of life, the thymus

gives all the T-cell detectives
in the body their life-long assignments.
T cells start out in
the thymus as police cadets
 They get trained by special macrophages that show new T cells
every possible little bit of garbage that a normal healthy body produces.

These bits are called “self”. T cells

whose receptors recognize “self”
are killed in the thymus
before they can leave.

If they ever got out they would become bad cops that
attack good cells instead of invaders
 Tommy finally cruises up to a macrophage that shows him
a piece of cold virus

He checks it with his receptors.

It’s a match.
Right away Tommy leaps into action.
The virus has has only
been in the body for 5 minutes.

First Tommy sends out chemicals

that signal regular police officers
in the body – B cells – to make antibodies
 Antibodies are like heat-seeking missiles that zero in on
a particular virus and kill it

Tommy also calls in a SWAT team

killer T-cells and together
they go out in search of the invader

They also start dividing rapidly,

doubling in number
about every six hours

It takes four days before millions of T-cells, B-cells and killer

T-cells are immobilized to kill all the virus in the body
 Immune system cells are some of the fastest dividing cell
in the body

One day Tommy is cruising the body

on his usual rounds
when he meets a thug in a
black leather jacket, an AIDS virus

He decides to check him out

with his receptors, but before he
can do anything, the little creep gets
right inside Tommy through a
tiny hole near the handle that
Tommy uses when he
visits macrophages
 Viruses don’t usually attack T-cells but AIDS does. That’s
what makes AIDS so bad

Now that Tommy has the AIDS virus,

little bits of AIDS proteins
will appear on his surface

This makes Tommy look very

bad to other cells in the
immune system.
Tommy sees a killer T-cell coming
and says his prayers
 Tommy knows that a killer T-cell is trained to kill
anything that looks foreign

The killer T-cell sees that bit of AIDS

on Tommy and without a second
thought kills his boss.
That’s the end of Tommy

The tragedy of AIDS is that T-cells are

the mastermind detectives
of the body’s defense system,
the one who organize the other cops
 Once AIDS is inside a T-cell they look like spies to the
rest of the immune system

So the body kills off its best cops which then makes
it harder to fight AIDS and any other infection

Most people with AIDS actually die of a common disease

That would never kill someone with a healthy immune system
Thank you