Toll-Like Receptors and Natural Killer Cells

Natural killer (NK) cells represent a heterogeneous subpopulation of lymphocytes of the innate immune system with a powerful antitumor activity, a function given by a complex collection of receptors. They act synergistically to recognize, regulate, or amplify the response according to the microenvironment, thus highlighting Toll-like receptors (TLRs), a type of receptors that allows sensing evolutionarily molecules conserved of pathogens known as pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) and/or damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs). Those TLRs are essential to start the immune response. There is little information about the different subpopulations that form NK cells as well as their expression profile of innate immune response receptors in hematological cancers.