Immune Response: We need to know more

Immune Response: We need to know more

Each year the Edge Foundation invites scientist to answer their annual question. This year’s question is a bit mundane. However, Buddhini Samarasinghe’s answer is excellent. If you scan through the lists of top medical/scientific achievements from 2015 you probably won’t catch anything about the immune system. It’s so important but overlooked. It’s also often exaggerated, i.e., if only we’d eat more garlic or turmeric, then we could cure cancer without those pesky chemicals. BTW, that’s sarcasm.

As Buddhini carefully mentioned in the article, I agree that we are just scratching the surface. There’s so much we don’t know about the immune system. It’s not a panacea for fighting cancer (yet). If you perturb one part for cancer therapy, for example, it’s quite possible you may trigger diabetes. That’s a wild example, but I’m sure you get my point. Cautious excitement.

Originally shared by Buddhini Samarasinghe

The Immune System: A Grand Unifying Theory for Biomedical Research

Every year, the Edge Foundation asks a thought-provoking question (known as the Edge Annual Question) and invites scientists and intellectuals to contribute with essays. This year’s Edge Annual Question is a predictive one. It asks, “What Do You Consider The Most Interesting Recent Scientific News? What Makes it Important?”. I had the pleasure of being invited to submit a contribution again this year, and I really enjoyed writing this essay during the Christmas break 🙂

Edge solicits answers from people who are experts in a wide variety of fields, ranging from neuroscience to quantum physics, from psychology to sociology. For biomedical science, at first the obvious choice for a response would be something like CRISPR – indeed, many of the other responses have covered this fantastic ‘genome editing’ tool that allows us to manipulate our own DNA. But as I thought about the question, I realised that at the end of the day, CRISPR is still just a tool, much like gene cloning was several years ago. However, there are intriguing, broader discoveries within biomedical science, with exciting implications for human diseases; in my opinion these outshine the discovery of CRISPR.

I am talking about the immune system’s role in disease.

“Since 430 BC we have known of biological structures and processes that protect the body against disease; but even today we are just beginning to understand how deeply involved they are in our lives. The immune system’s cellular sentries weave an intricate early warning network through the body; its signaling molecules—the cytokines—trigger and modulate our response to infection, including inflammation; it is involved in even so humble a process as the clotting of blood in a wound. Today we are beginning to grasp how—from cancer to diabetes, from heart disease to malaria, from dementia to depression—the immune system is involved at a fundamental level, providing us with the framework to understand, and to better treat these wide-ranging ailments”

When it comes to ‘interesting scientific news’, our self-interest will guarantee that anything we can do to extend and improve the quality of our lives will always be news. The immune system provides a unifying framework for understanding nearly every major condition that affects us, and on that basis it will always be newsworthy.

Full essay at http://edge.org/response-detail/26621

Image: Healthy human T-cell, one of the key components of our immune system (Wikipedia)

Happy New Year, everyone! 🙂