Killer cells craftier than thought

— -- In the rough-and-tumble world of your immune system, cells don't come any tougher than the "natural killer" cells the body deploys as front-line troops to battle infection.

"Natural killer cells are kind of the 'Marines' of the immune system, first on the beach to hold off the enemy," says microbiologist Lewis Lanier of the University of California, San Francisco.

And just like the real Marines, a study led by Lanier's co-author, Joseph Sun, shows that natural killer cells turn out to be a lot craftier than their reputation might suggest. Released Sunday by the journal Nature, the study overturns a bit of conventional scientific wisdom about the nature and origins of our immune system.

Immune system cells respond to invaders, from bacteria to viruses to allergens, in two stages. First, "innate" immune cells hassle invaders right away after a wound or infection, natural killer cells in the forefront. Always circulating in the bloodstream, natural killer cells burst virus-infected (or cancerous) cells after hooking on to distinctive proteins on their infected surfaces.

Innate cells are thought to be short-lived, from a few days to weeks, equipped with surfaces that hook onto a broad range of invaders, and serve as general-purpose protectors. From an evolutionary standpoint, the innate system looks like the first and simplest line of defense that animals developed, Lanier says. "Innate cells hold the fort until the 'adaptive' immune cells can beat off the attack."

The defining characteristic of innate immune cells had been that they exhibited no "memory" of past infections, says Harvard's Ulrich von Andrian.

The second stage of the immune system response comes from the "adaptive" immune system, so-called B and T cells, which in contrast take about a week to grow in response to infection, and are specifically tuned to the invader (this is one reason it takes so long to get rid of a cold.) Unlike innate immune cells, some of these adaptive cells live a long time, retaining a "memory" of the invader that makes for a stronger response to the next attack.