B-cell

Her plasma is constantly patrolling for anything that looks like a B antigen.

So if we look at the inventory, if a nurse accidentally hung a bag of AB-negative blood and transfused it into Leilani, her anti-B antibodies would instantly recognize the B antigen on those donor cells as a foreign invading threat.

The immune response would be catastrophic.

The IgM antibodies would latch onto the donor red blood cells, activating the complement cascade.

Leilani is negative.

She lacks the D antigen.

Now, with the ABO system, she naturally had anti-B antibodies circulating just from environmental exposure.

Does she naturally have anti-D antibodies circulating because she is Rh-negative?

On September 25th, 2026, we talked with Dr. Chris Risley, a postdoctoral fellow in the Lund and Worthy Labs at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

Dr. Risley also received his PhD from UAB, where his work examined the regulation of a unique population of effector memory B cells following influenza infection.

His current research focuses on the regulation of local B cell responses to influenza infection in the airways, including the role of tertiary lymphoid tissues in protective immunity.

Thanks for talking with us today.

But I think at the lab's core, at my core, I am a B cell immunologist.

That is how I would choose to define my research.

And I'm very interested in how B cells respond to antigens.

And we use flu as a model, which I think is awesome.

Nevertheless, those CAR T-cell therapies can also have severe side effects, so that's maybe something we need to discuss later.

But the prospect of these CAR T-cells having such profound effects on patients who were previously actually given up on, has also made people think, can you use those cell therapies maybe for other diseases where the same types of cells, B cells, that are targeted.

So B cells are immune cells in your body that produce antibodies.

And

in blood cancers, they multiply abnormally in abnormal amounts.

But those B cells also play a role in autoimmune diseases.

And in autoimmune diseases, they produce autoantibodies that are directed towards your own body.

And that's actually something you don't want.

I'll say more about that in a minute.

The humoral immune response involves antibody production and antibodies are made by a subset of cells called B cells.

B cells.

The other part of the adaptive immune system is the cell mediated immune system.

This is an immune system that doesn't involve antibodies but involves cells that are activated in response to a foreign antigen and that utilize cellular means to get rid of it.

The main effector cells in cell-mediated immunity, the cells that do the main business are called T cells.

Now, T cells are also involved in humoral immunity but they're not the end result.

The end result in humoral immunity is B cells producing antibodies.

An antigen is anything that causes your immune system to ID a pathogen and then create an antibody against it.

Now antibodies aren't cells, they're highly specialized proteins produced by B cells to recognize and help lay the smack down on intruders.

But antibodies can't kill invaders themselves, they're just little proteins after all.

The best that they can do by themselves is sort of just swarm all over the invader, making it harder for it to move and to excrete toxins or otherwise infiltrate healthy cells.

But more often antibodies serve as tags, attaching themselves to the scumbags and then releasing chemical signals to nearby phagocytes, alerting them that it's dinner time.

Your acquired immune system also has its own type of white blood cells, not phagocytes, which go after everything that looks a little bit sketchy, but lymphocytes, which go after specific things that they already know about.

There are two major types of lymphocytes, the T cells, which form in your bone marrow and then migrate and mature in the thymus gland right behind your breastbone, and the B cells, which originate and mature in the bone marrow.

What T and B actually stand for is a long story, but if it helps you to remember, T's mature in the thymus, B's in the bone marrow.