Organ-specific immune responses associated with infectious disease

✍ Scribed by Christian R Engwerda; Paul M Kaye

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 194 KB
• Volume: 21
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-5699
• DOI: 10.1016/s0167-5699(99)01549-2

✦ Synopsis

rgan-specific immune responses are characteristic of autoimmune and infectious diseases. In recent years, substantial progress has been made in understanding the immunological basis of organ-specific autoimmune responses, whereby cell destruction by self-reactive immune effector cells leads to specific tissue pathology and disease 1-3 . More recently, significant advances have been made in understanding how some viruses subvert the host immune response to enable survival in specific tissue sites [3][4][5] . However, our understanding of organ-specific immune responses following infection with nonviral pathogens is limited. This article will discuss our current knowledge of factors that contribute to organ-specific immune responses in a murine model of visceral leishmaniasis (VL), and compare and contrast these findings with models of other nonviral infectious diseases. Leishmaniasis provides an appropriate model for such studies because, unlike many other parasitic infections, once parasites are established in the host there is minimal life-cycle diversity to obscure underlying differences in organ-specific immune function.