Professor Piotr Trzonkowski, CEO of PolTREG, is focused on developing cell therapies for autoimmune diseases like type-1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis using polyclonal T-regulatory cell therapy. Treg cells are key in regulating the immune system and preventing autoimmune diseases. Clinical trials are showing promise for safe and effective treatments for preventing type-1 diabetes in pre-symptomatic patients and maintaining insulin production for years after treatment in those with this form of diabetes.
Piotr explains, "My initial research subject was vaccination in the elderly, and I was looking for the reasons they did not respond to the vaccine. It was initially on the flu vaccine. The same is valuable, for example, for the COVID-19 vaccine. What we found is that elderly people do not respond to the vaccines because of the high level of accumulation of T-regulatory cells. T-regulatory cells can suppress immune responses, which is bad for the elderly."
"A very simple answer would be if you compare the immune system to kind of an army. The majority of the army fights with enemies. In the case of the immune system, these enemies are bacteria and viruses that attack us, and in each and every army, there must be police who keep an eye on the soldiers. So, the soldiers really fight with the enemies and do not fight with the self-tissue."
"The T-regulatory cells are a kind of military police of the immune system, which really keeps an eye on the immune system. So, the immune system fights with bacteria and virus cells and does not touch our own tissues. We call it in immunology, keeping the immune tolerance. So, proper immune tolerance is very dependent on T-regulatory cells. We say that this is an immune-dominant mechanism. T-regulatory cells are present in each and every process where the immune system responds to the bacteria. So, we successfully fight the infection, and at the same time, we do not destroy ourselves."
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