6. Innate Immunity 1 Flashcards
1. The innate immune system is important because it primes immunity. 2. It senses environmental perturbations and releases signals that excite immune cells. 3. Pathogens target innate immunity to try and silence the impact of their presence
What is the eternal mission of the immune system?
- How do I know who I am?
- How do I know who you are?
- How do I know if you are dangerous?
What is innate immunity required for?
- Adaptive immunity
- Immune memory
- Long term immune response
What is innate immunity at its basic level?
A stress response
What can trigger the innate immune response?
- Infection
- Surgery
- Cancer
- Metabolic dysregulation like diabetes
- Pollution
What made it clear that innate immunity is very important?
Congenital immunodeficiencies of innate immunity causes children not to live very long.
What is the shifting idea of innate immunity?
Shifted from a simple idea of barriers to something more active and dynamic
What are the 2 main parts of the innate immune system?
- Adjuvants that trigger innate immunity
- Inflammation as a response to activation
What is inflammation?
- A dynamic tissue response to infection or injury.
- Causes Swelling, Redness, and an influx of platelet and leukocytes.
- It is important for expelling pathogens and wound healing
What is the framework of innate immunity?
- Hard wired specificity that doesn’t change over a person’s life
- Multiple receptor systems with common effector pathways.
- Tightly integrated with adaptive immune responses
- Can be inappropriately activated
What is an adjuvant?
A substance that enhances the immune system’s response to the presence of an antigen.
Why were adjuvants discovered?
When vaccinologists were trying to improve vaccines, they found something that was needed to make the adaptive immune response better, but they didn’t know what it was or how it worked.
What is Freund’s adjuvant?
- An addition to a vaccine needed to trigger an innate response.
- It contains lipids, bits of bacteria and other bits,
- It was needed to for vaccine to be effective but they didn’t understand why.
What did vaccinologists discover about adaptive immunity?
You can’t have a strong adaptive immune response without an innate response
How was adjuvant’s function discovered?
- In the development of horse vaccines for diphtheria.
- They needed to purify the diphtheria toxin.
- They did this by precipitating and isolating the toxins from the horse blood using aluminium salts.
- Once the science perfected his technique, he stopped using the aluminium salts and the immune response disappeared.
- This showed the salts were acting as an adjuvant and required to cause the immune response.
What types of responses can adjuvants trigger?
- inflammation
- NETosis
What are vaccine adjuvants?
Components that enhance the immunogenicity of vaccines when administered in conjunction with vaccine agents.
What are some examples of vaccine adjuvants?
- Emulsions
- immunostimulatory complexes
- Proteases
- Bacterial products
- Mineral compounds
What is the innate immune system recognising?
Foreign/microbial patterns
What are the foreign patterns that are recognised by innate immunity?
- Something that is conserved across microbe families.
- These patterns are found in multiple microbes but are not specific
- These are things like LPS, RNA, Cell walls
What are PAMPs?
- Pathogen associated molecular patterns
- Molecules and components of pathogens that are shed during infection and can activate PRR.
What are MAMPs?
- Microbe associated molecular patterns.
- They are not pathogenic but they do activate the innate immune system.
- They cause low-level inflammation but also have beneficial functions.
When are PAMPs and MAMPs normally recognised?
When they have ben shed from their pathogen
What are DAMPs?
- Danger associated molecular patterns.
- They are usually produced from the consequences of PAMPs but they are host molecules.
- DAMPs are released on cell damage or death.
- They are host molecules like DNA, ATP or actin.
How do DAMPs activate innate immunity?
Innate cells detect DAMPs through PRR and see they are outside of the cells and know something is killing or damaging the cells.
How is uric acid is a DAMP?
- It is made inside the cell and gets released in diseases like gout.
- It can cause powerful activation of the inflammasome.
- Uric acid and other crystals are good DAMPs because they cause powerful activation.
What are the general properties of adjuvants?
- They are foreign
- They are dangerous
Are PAMPs and DAMPs adjuvants?
yes
What is the general framework of immune activation?
- The innate immune priming through transcription factors like NF-kB.
- This leads to activation of the inflammasome and a full innate response.
- This triggers a good adaptive response.
- There is a lot of interaction and feedback loops between all the stages. More like a cycle then linear steps.
What is required for a successful adaptive response?
Innate immunity priming and inflammation
Why does the innate immune response need to be rapid?
- Due to the fast replication times of bacteria and viruses.
- A rapid response prevents the bacteria from overgrowing in the tissue