A bacterium that tricks the immune system into nurturing it
The discovery may usher in new approaches to treating infections
THE IMMUNE system has many weapons with which to counter hostile incomers. But what works against one may not be effective against another. An interloper can take advantage of this by misdirecting the system into thinking it is fighting an enemy that it is not. This buys time for that interloper to become entrenched. That is sneaky. Sneakier still, though, is the approach just discovered by Ruslan Medzhitov of Yale University. As he and his colleagues report in Immunity, they have found a bacterium that induces its host’s immune system to release compounds on which it can then feed.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Fed by the hand that should bite it”
From the May 14th 2022 edition
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