Increasing efforts points to the understanding of how to maximize the capabilities of the adaptive immune system to fight against the development of immune and inflammatory disorders. Here we focus on the role of T cells as immune cells which subtype imbalance may lead to disease onset. Specifically, we propose that autoimmune disorders may develop as a consequence of a metabolic imbalance that modulates switching between T cell phenotypes. We highlight a Systems Biology strategy that integrates computational metabolic modelling with experimental data to investigate the metabolic requirements of T cell phenotypes, and to predict metabolic genes that may be targeted in autoimmune inflammatory diseases. Thus, we propose a new perspective of targeting T cell metabolism to modulate the immune response and prevent T cell phenotype imbalance, which may help to repurpose already existing drugs targeting metabolism for therapeutic treatment.
Keywords: Systems Biology; T cell phenotypes; autoimmune disorders; computational modelling; metabolism; multi-scale modelling; phenotype switching.
© 2022 The Authors. Clinical and Translational Medicine published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Shanghai Institute of Clinical Bioinformatics.