Although most readers of this newsletter probably know what the thymus is, I'd wager that a lot of adults aren't familiar. That's probably because the thymus, a small organ that can fit in the palm of your hand, really is only known to have an important role during childhood — when it acts a kind of training ground for T cells. After puberty, it starts shrinking, but a couple of new studies out in Nature this week suggest that the thymus might be more important for adult health than previously thought.
In the pair of papers, researchers provided some evidence suggesting that better thymic health is associated with healthier aging and better responses to immunotherapy. In one study, authors used a deep-learning model to analyze CT chest images from 5,000 participants and create a "thymic health score," which was related to the size of the thymus, finding that higher or better scores correlated with lower incidence and mortality of certain diseases like lung cancer or cardiovascular disease. In the other paper, the same researchers found higher thymic health scores also correlated with better outcomes in patients receiving immune checkpoint therapy.
Interesting! This adds to some evidence that the thymus might be doing something to maintain immune health as we age (a Massachusetts General Hospital observational study in 2023 had a similar conclusion), an observation that would upend current anatomical dogma. For me, the studies raise some intriguing new questions: What is the role of thymus in adult health, if there truly is one, and how could that biology be leveraged to improve or predict immunotherapy outcomes in cancer?
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