Aggregated Neutrophils Limit Inflammation

Neutrophils represent an intriguing and long overlooked therapeutic target toward resolving inflammation.

A recent study in Nature Medicine by researcher Christine Schauer, MD, of the Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg in Bavaria, Germany, and colleagues, describes how neutrophils can limit the inflammatory response in healthy individuals.¹ An understanding of this new antiinflammatory pathway may point the way toward future, novel immunomodulatory therapies for gout, a disease associated with inflammation that includes an accumulation of neutrophils.

Neutrophils densely infiltrate inflamed tissues, and traditional understanding has it that mononuclear phagocytes are important for the clearance of neutrophils. The new data suggest that neutrophils can contribute not only to their own clearance, but also to the resolution of the entire local inflammatory response by forming aggregated neutrophil extracellular traps (aggNETs) that degrade cytokines and chemokines.

Therefore, they can disrupt recruitment and activation of neutrophils and other inflammatory cells. Neutrophils require reactive oxygen species (ROS) to form these aggNETs, the authors point out.