A Collaborative Win for TRR 332: New CD177 Neutrophil Subgroups Identified

A team from the Medical Faculty at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working closely with colleagues at the Leibniz Institute for Analytical Sciences (ISAS) in Dortmund, has just published a paper in Advanced Science showing that neutrophils split into two stable subgroups defined by the surface protein CD177 — one group expresses it, the other carries a perfectly functional CD177 gene but never switches it on — and that the two populations differ sharply at the molecular level and play distinct roles in disease, from stroke to head and neck cancer. "Our data show that CD177-negative neutrophils are a permanent feature... they aren't a transitional or maturation stage, but a genuinely stable subgroup in their own right," explains Marcel Jung, the doctoral researcher at the Institute for Experimental Immunology and Imaging and a driving force behind the project.

What stands out about this work is how thoroughly it was a TRR 332 effort, bringing together many PIs like Raphael Chevre, Anika Grüneboom, Daniela Maier-Begandt, Anja Hasenberg, Oliver Soehnlein, Jianxu Chen, Jadwiga Jablonska, Dirk M. Hermann, and Matthias Gunzer, alongside numerous students from across the consortium. The integrated proteomics and lipidomics approach that made the discovery possible, and the clinical data linking CD177 status to outcomes in stroke and head and neck cancer, came together only because several groups across the consortium pooled their expertise and samples. Gunzer, project leader within TRR 332, points to the translational payoff of that collaboration: "Our results raise the hope that the ratio of CD177-positive to CD177-negative neutrophils in the blood could serve as a biomarker to estimate the risk of head and neck cancer progression or complications after stroke." It's a nice example of the kind of result that a cross-group TRR collaboration is built to produce — congratulations to everyone involved.