Department of Biomedical Research, University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler, Tyler, TX 75708, USA.
J Mol Cell Biol. 2010 Oct;2(5):237-9. doi: 10.1093/jmcb/mjq016. Epub 2010 Aug 5.
Thymocytes after T-lineage commitment develop in the T-cell pathway. However, in a recent study, Li et al. (2010) demonstrated that inducing to delete Bcl11b gene in these thymocytes, even in mature T cells turns these cells into natural killer (NK) cells during the culture. They called this conversion 'reprogramming', and the reprogrammed killer cells 'ITNK cells'. The ITNK cells possessed tumor-killer ability and did not indiscriminately kill normal cells. This exciting finding represents a major breakthrough towards curing cancer and identifies an important, novel transcription factor in the thymus development.
胸腺细胞在 T 细胞谱系确定后在 T 细胞途径中发育。然而，在最近的一项研究中，Li 等人（2010 年）表明，在培养过程中，即使在成熟 T 细胞中诱导删除 Bcl11b 基因，也会将这些细胞转化为自然杀伤（NK）细胞。他们将这种转化称为“重编程”，并将重编程的杀伤细胞称为“ITNK 细胞”。这些 ITNK 细胞具有肿瘤杀伤能力，不会不加区分地杀死正常细胞。这一令人兴奋的发现代表了癌症治疗的重大突破，并确定了胸腺发育中的一个重要的新型转录因子。
