Re-Engineering the Immune System

destinyland notes a microbiology professor describing "Immunity on Demand" (or "Immunity 2.0") and wonders whether we could genetically engineer all the antibodies we need. "...there's a good chance this system, or something like it, will actually be in place within decades. Caltech scientists have already engineered stem cells into B cells that produce HIV-fighting antibodies — and an NIH researcher engineered T cells that recognize tumors which has already had promising clinical trials again skin cancer. Our best hope may be to cut out the middleman. Rather than merely hoping that the vaccine will indirectly lead to the antibody an individual needs, imagine if we could genetically engineer these antibodies and make them available as needed?"

Comments

Dangers of the right thing

[gmuslera]

Smarting up our immune system could turn to be a dumb idea, as a good part of us comes from virus

Re:Dangers of the right thing

[mcgrew]

Actally having too strong an immune system IS bad; that's what arthritis is, your body's immune system attacking you. But having bioengineered antibodies would ge great.

Too bad it will be "a few decades", I'll be dead by then.

Re:I was under...

[sonnejw0]

I'm a Biologist, and you're somewhat mistaken. Antibodies are so infinitesimally tiny that no light microscope can possibly see them, even compared to virii which are also fairly invisible under a microscope. Antibodies are easy to detect, however, because they have a constant region on their tail end, which we know how to identify. We have compounds that bind to that constant tail end and as a result tag the antibody and what it is binding to. It's like the antibody is a flag pole, and biologists can run a colorful flag up that pole when we want to see what piece of the ground the flag pole is attached to.

Engineering antibodies is a simple matter, it's the basis of immunization/vaccination. Traditionally, we give chopped up bacteria and virii to a patient and their immune system detects those and creates more antibodies to put into the blood stream to stave off future infection. With this approach, instead we feed immune cells in a Petri dish an antigen, and they produce antibodies specific to that antigen. We can separate out these antibodies and purify them because they have that constant tail region that we can detect. We can then inject these into a person and these antibodies will cling to whatever thing they've been engineered to detect and attract the native immune system to it.

We can also use genetic engineering tricks to produce en masse a single specific kind of antibody. The technology has been there for research labs for decades. Either method will work fairly similarly, but in my opinion the former seems "easier", because we let the cells sort out what specific antibody to make. If we genetically engineer immune cells, we have to know exactly what gene sequence will produce an antibody targetting exactly what we want targetted ... which is good if we know what the antibody gene sequence is already, but difficult to figure out on our own. Nature is much more efficient (and cost effective) at that kind of thing. Once we let nature figure out what's best, we can just figure out the gene sequence from there to mass produce the antibody.

Re:I was under...

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm a Biologist

> virii

So it's the biologists who are screwing up this beautiful language! The enemy is within the gates!

Re:Boy, Howdy!

[ChromeAeonium]

A pity about their children suffering from their parent's stupidity, but maybe they'll wise up once they grow up.

Alas, not just their own unfortunate kids. Ever read about Dana McCaffery? She was too young to be vaccinated, and she died of pertussis that the anti-vaxxers brought back. Then one of the local pro-disease dumbasses went and said that no one ever died of pertussis.

Herd immunity

[overshoot]

Ever read about Dana McCaffery? [danamccaffery.com] She was too young to be vaccinated, and she died of pertussis that the anti-vaxxers brought back.

To be fair, pertussis is an environmental bacterium and is pretty common in adults -- it doesn't need anti-vaxx (aka "pro-disease") loons to "bring [i] back."

Not so measles -- that's one we could actually send off to join smallpox in the annals of extinct pathogenic viruses. Or we could, if it weren't for people like Andrew Wakefield, who saw a chance to make some money by killing children in the UK. Thus we have babies too young to be vaccinated contracting measles in their paediatricians' waiting rooms because somebody took their unvaccinated darlings to Switzerland and when they came back the little darlings came down sick. http://www.jennymccarthybodycount.com/Jenny_McCarthy_Body_Count/Home.html