Other uses of the immune system

I know something's amiss when my google news alert returns headlines like these: Why women who lust after Brad Pitt may just fancy his immune system It's His Immune System That You Actually Want to Sleep With The key to male sexiness: A powerful immune system? and my personal favorite Antibodies, Not Hard Bodies: The Real Reason Women Drool Over Brad Pitt These snazy headlines are all pointing to a recent paper in Nature Communications. The paper's methodology is pretty simple: They took 74 Latvian men and immunized them against Hepatitis B. Later, they measured the participants' blood for…

Cool: During the tests, mice were given access to deposits of heroin over an extended period of time. Those given the vaccine showed a huge drop in heroin consumption, giving the institute hope that it could also work on people[...] Using the immune system's ability to make an immune response against any molecule is awesome, but there are a number of potential problems with this sort of approach. In the article, a scientist is quoted as saying that this might block other opioids that are used as theraputics (like Vicodin), but I don't think it's a good idea to use opioids as pain relievers in…

I promise, this will be my last semen post for a while. I've talked about allergy to semen. I've talked about allergens in semen. And I've talked about autoimmunity to semen. All of these are problems, leading to discomfort or infertility. But what if those problems could be leveraged for our benefit? [Source: These drawings were made by Antonie von Leeuwenhoek - the first man to view sperm cells under a microscope] Using the immune system as a contraceptive is not a new idea. In 1899, Karl Landsteiner and Elie Metchnikoff (both of whom would later win Nobel Prizes) independently…

Abbie over at ERV has a really great summary of a new Nature Medicine paper, in which the authors managed to turn a mouse's immune system against prostate tumors by infecting them with viruses engineered to express prostate proteins. Some of the results struck her as a bit counterintuitive, but I thought of some possible explanations. I was going to leave this as a comment on her blog, but the more I read the paper, the more stuff bubbled up, and I though it deserved a full post. Go read Abbie's post first though, or this probably won't make much sense. Admittedly speculative explanations to…

You've all heard of Malaria. It's bad. It infects hundreds of millions of people, mostly in developing nations. It rarely leads directly to death*, but the resulting illness can lay people out for days or weeks, increasing an already heavy economic burden on many of the poorest countries in the world. Folks from affluent regions can get medication to prevent or treat the illness, but treatments can be expensive and have nasty side effects, so it's not practical for most of the population. The good news is that Plasmodium, the parasite that causes the disease, can only be transmitted by…

Cancer sucks. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that - it's one of the leading causes of death in developed countries, and our treatment options are pretty thin. Basically, it amounts to cutting out the tumors that can be seen, and then giving a controlled administration of poison in the hopes that the cancer cells die before you do. Don't get me wrong - advances in oncology have saved many lives, but it's no surprise that there's a lot of research happening to find better options. One promising avenue of study is augmenting the immune system to fight cancer directly. It's known that the…

Macrophages are really good at gobbling stuff up. It's all right there in the name - they are big (macro) eaters (phage). I study them in the context of the immune system - one of the things they do really well is eat up bacteria and other pathogens that have found their way into your tissues. As a front line sentinel, they also are capable of kick-starting inflammation and recruiting the rest of the cells necessary to clear an infection. But that's not all, there's more. Weight loss and lipolysis promote a dynamic immune response in murine adipose tissue Here we characterized the response of…

Normally, I would feel woefully unqualified to analyze a Nature Neuroscience paper, but I'm going to do it anyway. How could I pass it up? It features a Toll-like receptor! Toll-like receptors are typically expressed in immune cells to regulate innate immunity. We found that functional Toll-like receptor 7 (TLR7) was expressed in C-fiber primary sensory neurons and was important for inducing itch (pruritus), but was not necessary for eliciting mechanical, thermal, inflammatory and neuropathic pain in mice. TLR's are on the front lines of immune defense. They are present on many cells types,…

[This article was originally posted at webeasties.wordpress.com] About 4 years ago, I went to a seminar at TSRI that convinced me that cancer would be over in relatively short order. The man speaking (I wish I could remember who it was) showed that his group had been able to target radioactive heavy metals directly to melanoma solid tumors to destroy them. The data were striking; enormous, football-sized tumors shrank to nothing in a matter of weeks, and the therapy worked more than 90% of the time. I couldn't understand why this wasn't a bigger deal, why wasn't this front-page news? As it…