Assistant Professor Susmit Suvas Unravels How the Immune System Works

T cells are a type of white blood cell, or lymphocyte, that plays a central role in our body's immune system. Following a viral infection that reduces the number of T cells, the immune system responds by replenishing the T cell population, a process called homeostatic expansion. Although such expansion is good for maintaining your body's ability to fight future infections, it can also trigger autoimmunity, where the immune system attacks your own body. Assistant Professor Susmit Suvas, of the Department of Biological Sciences, examined this process in a recent paper titled Homeostatic Expansion of CD4+ T cells Upregulates VLA-4 and Exacerbates HSV-Induced Corneal Immunopathology (Microbes ad Infection, Volume 10, Pages 1192-1200, 2008). Suvas and his collaborators concluded that "homeostatic expansion of T cells, as could occur in a virus-induced lymphopenia, may generate cells with enhanced effector function that can contribute to tissue damage."