Antibodies produced in the lung can prevent respiratory infections from becoming severe
Understanding how antibodies and antibody-secreting cells can fight against lung infection will provide new directions for improving vaccines to prevent severe respiratory infection and for designing treatments that cure respiratory infections
2021-06-01
(Press-News.org) (Boston)--Only a small subset of people who get a lung infection go on to become very sick yet who will become severely ill or why is unclear. This is now widely recognized in the context of COVID-19, where most people have mild or no illness while others with the same infection become extremely sick or even die.
Researchers now have discovered that after recovering from a respiratory infection, new cells get deposited in lung tissue, persist there and then become antibody secreting cells very quickly if the lungs later get re-infected by something similar.
"It is increasingly clear that our lungs contain their own specialized immune system, different from the immune system throughout the rest of the body," explained corresponding author Joseph Mizgerd, ScD, professor of medicine, microbiology and biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine.
Mizgerd and his team studied a combination of infections in experimental models and analyses of cells collected from human lungs. "We found lungs that had recovered from infections had new cells that were not there before infection, capable of quickly producing antibodies when stimulated. We showed that antibodies in the lungs helped fight microbes and removing the cells making these antibodies compromised lung defense against respiratory pathogens," Mizgerd said.
According to the researchers, differences in lung-specific antibodies and antibody-secreting cells may be one of the important factors determining who will become very ill or instead experience mild or even no symptoms when infected by a respiratory pathogen. "With a better understanding of the components of lung immunity that prevent severe infections, we will be able to identify who is prone to severe disease when infected," he added.
Mizgerd believes that immunity that is lung-localized differs from more conventional types of immunity in that it tends to prevent severe disease instead of preventing infection altogether and it tends to be effective against a wider range of microbes instead of against only one single virus or bacteria. "Leveraging this knowledge may provide opportunities to develop novel types of vaccines that prevent severe disease caused by a broader spectrum of microbes, such as for all coronaviruses or all influenza viruses."
INFORMATION:
These findings appear online in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
This work was supported by funding from National Institutes of Health grants including: R35 HL135756, R01 AI115053, R33 HL137081, and F31 HL142199.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-06-01
In some environments there is no way for a seed to know for sure when the best time to germinate is.
In spring, cues like light, temperature and water may suggest to seeds that conditions are optimal for germination, but a week later an unpredictable drought or frost could kill the emerging seedlings.
So how does a plant make sure that all of its offspring are not killed at once by an ill-timed environmental stress following germination?
There is evidence that some plant species produce seeds that germinate at different times to hedge their bets against this risk. Many species produce seeds that can enter a dormant state and exist in the soil for several years and some also produce seeds that germinate at different ...
2021-06-01
Research by scientists from University of Southampton (UK) and the Central University of Jharkhand (India) and has shown the first COVID-19 lockdown in India led to an improvement in air quality and a reduction in land surface temperature in major urban areas across the country.
The study found that travel and work restrictions imposed early in the pandemic resulted in a significant environmental improvement, due to an abrupt reduction in industrial activities and a major decrease in the use of land and air transport.
The international team used data from a range of Earth Observation sensors, including those from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-5p and NASA's MODIS sensors, to measure changes in surface temperature and atmospheric ...
2021-06-01
Efforts to contain the novel coronavirus have caused lockdowns and school closures around the world. These efforts and policies have unfortunately cut off many children from valuable resources such as the opportunity for exercise, access to clean water and food, learning, and socialization. Therefore, the effects on mental health and behavior may be found not just in adults but children. However, studies published thus far have been limited to elucidating the mood of middle school and high school students and the conditions for which mood problems occur ...
2021-06-01
Drinking straws are single use plastic products which will be subjected to a Europe-wide sales ban from 2021 onwards. This is stated in EU Directive 2019/904 from 5 June 2019. Consequently, alternative materials have to be established for the production of drinking straws as well as other frequently used products which predominantly were made of plastic so far.
As set out in the EU Framework Regulation for food contact material (Regulation (EC) No. 1935/2004), objects that come into direct contact with food must be safe. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) has appraised straw, silicone, metal, paper and paper-board, durum wheat, and glass for their suitability to replace plastic ...
2021-06-01
Using a brain-training app helps people eat less junk food and lose weight, new research suggests.
The Food Trainer (FoodT app) trains people to tap on images of healthy foods - but to stop when they see unhealthy snacks, creating an association between these foods and stopping.
The new study, by the universities of Exeter and Helsinki, found that playing the game about once a day for a month led to an average one-point reduction of junk food consumption on an eight-point scale (the scale ranges from four or more items per day, to one or zero items per month).
Overall, people who used the app more also ...
2021-06-01
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disorder caused by the death of dopaminergic neurons in a part of the brain (known as substantia nigra pars compacta), which leads to a deficit of dopamine (DA), one of the main neurotransmitters active in the central nervous system. Symptomatic treatment focuses on increasing the concentration of dopamine into the brain.
However, dopamine is not directly administered, because it is unable to cross the so called blood-brain barrier, which prevents some of the substances circulating in the blood to penetrate into the nervous system. Thus, DA precursor levodopa (L-DOPA) -an amino-acid which participates ...
2021-06-01
Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Craig S. Carlson and Michiel Postema, from University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and Tampere University, Tampere, Finland discuss deep impact of superficial skin inking: acoustic analysis of underlying tissue.
Skin tattoos are a common decoration, but profound scientific study on whether a skin tattoo alters the acoustic response from superficial tissues, and therefore from underlying tissue, was previously lacking; thus, any quantitative effects were unknown.
This study is the first to investigate the nature of artifacts in ultrasound images, which have been observed to originate from tattooed skin. The work was conducted theoretically and experimentally using ...
2021-06-01
June 1, 2021 -- Researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre, Brazil found that when health workers were trained to promote infant healthy feeding practices to pregnant women their children consumed less fats and carbohydrates at 3 years of age and had lower measures of body fat at the age of 6. The study is the first to show that the roots for obesity start in the first year of life, after mothers stop breastfeeding. The findings are published online in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics.
"The first year after ...
2021-06-01
Aging is associated with an overall decline in health and increased frailty, and is a major risk factor for multiple chronic diseases. Frailty syndrome, characterized by weakness, fatigue and low physical activity, affects more than 30% of the elderly population. Increasing our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the aging process is a top priority to facilitate the development of interventions that will lead to the preservation of health and improvements on survival and lifespan.
Cumulative evidence suggests that diet and metabolism are key targetable regulators of healthy lifespan. Prof. Haim Cohen, Director of the Sagol Healthy Human Longevity Center at Bar-Ilan University, ...
2021-06-01
This is the main finding of new research involving more than 50,000 participants in 97 samples, published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
The findings show that the more extreme choices and decisions of men can be both positive and negative.
"The question of whether men and women make systematically different choices and decisions is one on the most fundamental (and controversial) questions in psychological research," Associate Professor Stefan Volk from the University of Sydney Business School said.
"We found men were much more likely than women to be at the extreme ends of the behavioural spectrum, either acting very ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Antibodies produced in the lung can prevent respiratory infections from becoming severe
Understanding how antibodies and antibody-secreting cells can fight against lung infection will provide new directions for improving vaccines to prevent severe respiratory infection and for designing treatments that cure respiratory infections
