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Updated: Jun 21, 2025

Adenoviral Transduction of Naive CD4 T Cells to Study Treg Differentiation
Published on: August 13, 2013
Fragile Treg cells: Traitors in immune homeostasis?
Xiyu Song1, Ruo Chen1, Jiaxin Li2
1National Translational Science Center for Molecular Medicine & Department of Cell Biology, Fourth Military Medical University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710032, PR China.
Abstract:
Regulatory T (Treg) cells play a key role in maintaining immune tolerance and tissue homeostasis. However, in some disease microenvironments, Treg cells exhibit fragility, which manifests as preserved FoxP3 expression accompanied by inflammation and loss of immunosuppression. Fragile Treg cells are formatively, phenotypically and functionally diverse in various diseases, further complicating the role of Treg cells in the immunotherapeutic response and offering novel targets for disease treatment by modulating specific Treg subsets. In this review, we summarize findings on fragile Treg cells to provide a framework for characterizing the formation and role of fragile Treg cells in different diseases, and we discuss how this information may guide the development of more specific Treg-targeted immunotherapies.
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