Blog Four: 4/14, Immunology: Information Extreme

 Good evening! I have read through a lot of Immunobiology, as it is a college-level text book and I think I may have overestimated myself just a bit on "reading the whole thing". But, with college-level books, comes the fact that I learned a whole bunch. As the name implies, it was a very science-heavy book, and definitely needs some scientific background knowledge to fully understand what is happening. 

The main thing I learned about was the complement system. No, it isn't a system where your immune system complements itself, but I think we all need a system like that right now. The complement system is made up of different distinct proteins that opsonize pathogens, or make the pathogens "appetizing" towards the phagocytes. Basically, the complement system is made up all sorts of different proteins that specialize in binding to the receptors of different pathogens, and the proteins attract immune system cells such as macrophages to break down the pathogen. Another terrifying thing about the complement system is that it can sort of rip open pathogens from their membranes. Again, the proteins bind to the cell receptors, but instead of attracting phagocytes, this time they release the enzyme convertase, which kind of just makes the pathogen's defenses just melt apart. 

Another thing I learned about is cytokine storms. If you remember, cytokines were kind of like the phone line to the emergency operators for the immune system, but now, it would be like if there was a crime happening down in a town's bank, and every single person in the entire country called the police, the national guard, and the entirety of NATO to attack the robber. Cytokine storms are when the cells that are dying send out too many cytokines, leading to an overreaction in defending against the attacker. Cytokine storms are also one of the leading causes of autoimmune diseases, as even once the intruder is eradicated, your body keeps attacking, and the only thing left it to attack itself. 

Autoimmune diseases are when the body recognizes its own cells as enemies, and we saw how detrimental they can be, like the examples from the last book. The body recognizes healthy cells as enemies, and starts to kill them off, like killing off an intruder. This then leads to the cells releasing cytokines, further attracting the immune system to attack civilian cells. And if it gets bad enough, the adaptive immune system gets alerted and now you have a full blown civil war going on inside of you. Or rather, a military that has just declared martial law and starts randomly attacking and killing innocent civilians. The last thing that happens is that with all "diseases" fought, there remain some T-cells that become memory T-cells which is where autoimmune diseases become chronic. Every now and then. your body will again trip the alarm of the immune system, and your body will start attacking itself. As long as there remains memory T-cells, you will be attacked again by your own body. Reading up on this though, I also learned that the reason that measles was so dangerous, is because it kills off your memory immune cells. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? I am wondering if there is a way to use a less-strong measles, or a targeted form of measles to see if it could help with autoimmune disease. The problem is though, it would most likely only work on someone who has never had a measles vaccine up until that point. I did find out that many chronic autoimmune diseases are genetic or can be detected quite early on. This means that if we know that the child has an autoimmune disease, maybe there is a way to have a controlled enviroment test to see if this measles can be used to treat autoimmune disease. I believe there have been many studies conducted into this idea already, and hopefully there can be some developments or breakthroughs in the near future.

To wrap up, mainly what I learned about were the complement system (very not fitting name), cytokine storms, and autoimmune diseases.  Unfortunately the book is a college-level book, so I couldn't really find any stunning or intriguing graphics to work as eye candy (some of them are too me though). Well, the vlog is coming up, and I think I have quite a lot to talk about. The past few weeks of this project has been absolutely wonderful, I am very happy to learn ever so more about this topic, and I think I have a solid idea down for what my TED Talk is going to cover: Welcome to the Kingdom Immunae (just a teaser)! See you next time! 

I commented on Parth, Stephan, and Eric's blogs.