Projects | Project Area B

Project B07

Treg cells in the chronically inflamed CNS

Background

Treg cells are exceedingly rare in the steady state central nervous system (CNS), yet their number increases during autoimmune neuroinflammation, and a stable population of Treg cells is retained in situ until long after the local acute inflammation has subsided.

We hypothesize that Treg cells in the CNS function as critical checkpoint for the switch between tissue recovery and tissue dysfunction in the chronic stages of MS.

Strategy

We use the experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) model to characterize Treg cells in the chronically inflamed CNS and the acute disease stage, and test the in vivo significance of identified genes using a newly generated system that allows for gene editing of Treg cells. We furthermore track Treg cells from the systemic immune compartment to the CNS to investigate whether differential peripheral activation sites are a determinant of the heterogeneity of Treg cells in the CNS.