Iron and immunity

Iron is an important nutrient for maintaining our health, and yet around 2 billion people worldwide have iron deficiency. A well-known consequence of iron deficiency is anaemia, because red blood cells need iron to transport oxygen.
However, we have recently found that the white blood cells of our immune system are also very sensitive to iron deficiency, and immune responses can be disabled by iron insufficiency. This discovery means that we now need to study in more depth the interplay between iron and immunity. We are going to do this in three ways.
First, we will examine why iron is so important to immune cells, and whether the chemical reactions that normally occur in white blood cells are altered by a lack of iron, and how this affects different types of immune cells.
Second, we will try to suppress unwanted and dangerous immune responses, for example in autoimmunity and during rejection of transplanted organs, by withholding iron from immune cells.
Lastly, through studies in healthy humans and patients around the world, we will learn how iron deficiency and iron nutrition influence the development and function of the immune system, including responses to vaccines.