This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American The very first line of defence against any ...

Innate immunity constitutes the body’s first line of defence against invading pathogens. This ancient, evolutionarily conserved system is activated within minutes of encountering foreign agents, ...

In a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers reviewed selected acute-phase proteins concerning their production, structure, and function. The advent of severe acute ...

The complement cascade, which has two pathways, increases inflammation, opsonizes pathogens—labels them for destruction—and directly kills invaders through lysis, which means rupturing their cell ...

Humans are protected by two branches of the immune system. Innate immunity provides built-in defense against widespread characteristics of bacteria and viruses, while adaptive immunity memorizes ...

If the COVID-19 pandemic has done one thing, it’s made us all more familiar with some of the important players in the immune system. Antibodies, B cells, and T cells are among the best known parts of ...

Innate lymphoid cells, which curiously behave like T cells even though they don’t recognize specific antigens, show promise as a potential cancer therapeutic. In the years that followed, other groups ...

Research from Radboud university medical center reveals that T cells from the adaptive immune system can manipulate the memory of innate immune cells. Previously, it was believed that the memory of ...

Filoviruses are negative-sense and single-stranded ribonucleic acid (RNA) viruses. The most well-known human-infecting filoviruses are marburgviruses and ebolaviruses. Infection can result in ...

Cancer immunotherapies, including cancer vaccines, harness and amplify the immune system’s natural ability to detect and attack cancer cells. In this illustration, immune T cells (pink) attach to a ...