TGF-β Activation and Function in Immunity

By M. Travis, D. Sheppard. Annual Review of Immunology, 2013

793 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The cytokine TGF-β plays an integral role in regulating immune responses. TGF-β has pleiotropic effects on adaptive immunity, especially in the regulation of effector and regulatory CD4+ T cell responses. Many immune and nonimmune cells can produce TGF-β, but it is always produced as an inactive complex that must be activated to exert functional effects. Thus, activation of latent TGF-β provides a crucial layer of regulation that controls TGF-β function. In this review, we highlight some of the important functional roles for TGF-β in immunity, focusing on its context-specific roles in either dampening or promoting T cell responses. We also describe how activation of TGF-β controls its function in the immune system, with a focus on the key roles for members of the integrin family in this process.

Subfields: Cancer Research, Immunology and Allergy, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/66463ee09c2d582938e4fe5e4679ce7db83f5c99

How researchers see this paper

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In Cancer Research

1. M. Smyth
2. Xiawei Wei

In Molecular Biology

1. D. Sheppard
2. Kevin K. Kim
3. M. Smyth
4. A. Descoteaux
5. H. Chapman
6. Guillermo Arango Duque
7. Xiawei Wei

Citations in the corpus

• Targeting TGF-β signal transduction for fibrosis and cancer therapy (2022, background): “In addition to the accumulated mutations of TGF-β signaling cascades, TGF-β-regulated immunosuppressive microenvironment also promotes tumor escape indirectly [118].”
• TGF-β1 Signaling and Tissue Fibrosis. (2018, background): “Dendritic cells also require avb8 to activate surface TGFb1 that in turn promotes differentiation of CD4 T cells to T cells that produce IL-17 along with IL-6, and to regulatory T cells (Tregs) (Travis and Sheppard 2014).”
• Macrophage Cytokines: Involvement in Immunity and Infectious Diseases (2014, background): “The capacity of M2c macrophages to induce Tregs makes them more effective than M2a macrophages at protecting organs from injury caused by inflammatory infiltrates (88).”
• Genome-wide association study implicates immune activation of multiple integrin genes in inflammatory bowel disease (2016, background): “In addition to the connections to anti-integrin and anti-TGF β therapies described above, IBD GWAS have previously implicated loci containing other therapeutically relevant genes, such as those in signalling pathways relevant to the targets of anti-TNF and anti-p40 IBD therapies ( Figure 3 , Supplem”
• TGF-β inhibits the activation and functions of NK cells by repressing the mTOR pathway (2016, background): “Transforming growth factor–b (TGF-b) is a cytokine of the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP)–activin family that mediates a wide range of actions in the immune system (12).”