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Annual Review of Immunology

Volume 43, 2025

Development and Functions of MAIT Cells

  • Marion Salou1, Rafael A. Paiva1 and Olivier Lantz1,2,3
  • 1Immunity and Cancer, INSERM U932, PSL University, Institut Curie, Paris, France; email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] 2Laboratoire d'Immunologie Clinique, Institut Curie, Paris, France 3Centre d'Investigation Clinique en Biothérapie, Gustave-Roussy and Institut Curie (CIC-BT1428), Paris, France
  • Vol. 43:253-283 (Volume publication date April 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on January 29, 2025
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

Mucosal-associated invariant T (MAIT) cells are evolutionarily conserved T cells that recognize microbial metabolites. They are abundant in humans and conserved during mammalian evolution, which suggests that they have important nonredundant functions. In this article, we discuss the evolutionary conservation of MAIT cells and describe their original developmental process. MAIT cells exert a wide variety of effector functions, from killing infected cells and promoting inflammation to repairing tissues. We provide insights into these functions and discuss how they result from the context of stimulation encountered by MAIT cells in different tissues and pathological settings. We describe how MAIT cell numbers and features are modified in disease states, focusing mainly on in vivo models. Lastly, we discuss emerging strategies to manipulate MAIT cells for therapeutic purposes.

Keyword(s): anti-infectious immunity, immune regulation, MAIT cells, microbiota, therapeutics, tissue repair
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2025-04-25
2025-06-18
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-immunol-082323-025943
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Development and Functions of MAIT Cells
Annual Review of Immunology 43, 253 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-immunol-082323-025943
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-immunol-082323-025943
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-immunol-082323-025943
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