🎓🔬 ImmunoCards Ep. 3 – APCs as Academic Roles 🔬🎓

What if immune cells were university staff?

In this episode, we reimagine Antigen Presenting Cells (APCs) as academic roles — because who hasn’t felt like a tired macrophage at 8 AM?!


🧪 Macrophage = Lab Technician
🧼 Keeps the lab clean, handles “samples,” works hard, gets zero fame.

🎓 Dendritic Cell = Full Professor
📣 Coordinates everything, presents to naïve students (T cells), constantly networking in lymph nodes.

🌍 pDC = Visiting Professor
🚨 Arrives from abroad, brings dramatic insight (Type I IFNs), then vanishes mysteriously.

🔁 Monocyte-derived DC = Lab Rotation Student
🎒Adaptable, learning fast, sometimes confused, often experimental. Leaves before you remember their name.

📚 B Cell = Master’s Student
🎯 Naïve at first, but after enough help (T cell feedback), develops thesis-level specificity (antibody production).

🧠 Follicular DC = Postdoc
🧩 Doesn’t publish on their own, but organizes memory like a pro and supports student development.

🦠 Langerhans Cell (skin) = PhD Student
🏞️ Lives in one tissue (skin), works independently, presents to local committees (T cells as TAC) with persistence.

✨ Academic or immunologist — which one are you?

Tag a friend who embodies the PhD student vibes of a Langerhans Cell or the professor-level chaos of a Dendritic Cell 😄

P.S. I can’t get my eyes off Professor — AI created her as both powerful and inspiring, and she definitely embodies the future version of me.
Interestingly, I read a paper this week showing how genetic ablation alters the transcriptional profiles of dendritic cell subsets (cDC1 and cDC2) in mice and compromises TfH, Tfr, and Th17 cell responses.
Fascinating how powerful dendritic cells (DCs) really are — and to think I used to focus mostly on cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) and, eventually, ILCs as innate versions of helper T cells (Th subsets). The more I learn, the more I see how critical DCs are in shaping immune responses.

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