Maria Curotto de Lafaille’s lab was trying to make human plasma cells in a dish. These weren’t just run-of-the-mill cells, though. The team was vying for something specific: plasma cells that churn out immunoglobulin E (IgE), the antibody that drives allergic reactions.
It was the mid-2010s, and from a research bench at the Immunology Network of A*STAR in Singapore, one of Lafaille’s postdocs, Sriram Narayanan, was plopping donated human B cells into a culture dish with some proteins, hoping the white blood cells would transform over a few days of incubation.
But so far, the experiment wasn’t going well.