A newly recognized type of immune cell may play an important role in causing asthma, perhaps explaining why current therapies sometimes fail, report researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston in the March 16th New England Journal of Medicine. These immune cells, known as natural-killer T cells (NKT cells), were found to be abundant in the lungs of patients with asthma, but virtually absent in the lungs of healthy people, supporting recent findings in mice showing a direct causative role for NKT cells.
