New Scientist article on immune systems9 Apr 2021 10:36
Here're some parts of the New Scientist article from 3rd Apr by Graham Lawton
"We have two immune systems. One is the “adaptive” system, a smart and highly effective special force that develops and deploys precision weapons against invaders. This is the now-familiar arsenal of antibodies and T-cells. The other half is the innate immune system, which is much less sophisticated. It consists of a set of fast-acting, all-purpose defences that bludgeon invaders indiscriminately, providing covering fire while the special forces get their boots on. One of its weapons is inflammation, which is a general purpose response to pathogens, injury and stress....the adaptive system can take several days to fire up, whereas the innate system gets going almost instantaneously."
"...the innate system does actually have memory. After an encounter with a pathogen, it switches to a heightened state of alert that persists for months or even years, making us more resistant to future infections. This “trained immunity” could have been exploited to significantly soften the blow of covid-19 and is now being developed as a life-saving weapon against the next pandemic."
The article goes on to outline how stimulating the innate immune system in mice elicits a form of immune protection that is independant of adaptive memory. Humans may be able to respond in the same way.
There were "...game-changing results from a clinical trial in Guinea-Bissaushowing that low-birthweight infants given the BCG vaccine had stronger innate immune responses to other pathogens, and much lower mortality than infants who didn’t have the injection." and "...SARS-CoV-2’s trick turned out to be evasion of the innate immune response, specifically a group of proteins called interferons...if the innate response are delayed, that is likely to result in a delay of the adaptive immune response. That is what makes SARS-CoV-2 so dangerous. With the interferon response hobbled and the adaptive immune system AWOL, the virus can run amok...Without backup from the adaptive system, the innate system may go into overdrive to try to fill the gap, leading to a potentially deadly cytokine storm."
"...The fact that SARS-CoV-2 gains a toehold by sabotaging the innate immune system suggests that trained immunity may be worth pursuing as a therapeutic strategy."
"...our growing understanding of trained immunity means we can start using it to our advantage....proposes a new take on an old trick in vaccine design: adjuvants. These are compounds added to boost vaccine effectiveness....envisages an inhalable aerosol that could be delivered to the lungs to make cells ofthe respiratory tract more hardy....the goal is to deploy all of the immune system, not just half of it."
So in a nutshell, go buy New Scientist!
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