Intraocular Resident Memory T Cells in Chronic Uveitis in Children
Autoimmune uveitis is an autoimmune disease that causes inflammation in the eye. Vision-threatening complications are common, particularly in children, and inflammation recurs in 85% of children when trying to stop medications, causing these patients to rely on life-long immune suppressing treatments. However, we don’t have answers for why patients are unable to stop medications, in part because we do not understand how inflammation recurs in eyes. We analyzed the fluid from within the eyes of children with uveitis who underwent surgery from complications of their disease. Each of these children had clinically inactive disease at the time, but we still found resident memory T cells (TRM) in the fluid from within their eye. TRM are an immune cell population that remain in tissues after inflammation and survive long-term.
We have previously shown that TRM play a role in recurrent joint inflammation in arthritis. Importantly, we demonstrated that targeting TRM can blunt arthritis flares. Thus, we hypothesize that TRM accumulate in eyes with uveitis and play a role in uveitis relapse as well. We will use a mouse model of uveitis to characterize the cells that remain in the eyes after inflammation and investigate the effect of depleting eye-targeting T cells on recurrent eye inflammation. These studies will change our understanding of uveitis and how inflammation recurs in eyes, presenting TRM as a potential new target for disease control.