ridvanarda – stock.adobe.com
Decryption – French researchers have emerged a new field of research called “ancestral immunity”. It comes from bacterial proteins that have preserved in humans the ability to fight pathogens.
The immune system is a ballet of extraordinary complexity, which combines innate mechanisms (which allow our body to react very quickly to any pathogen, injury or cancer cell) and acquired (via the lymphocytes mainly, which have “learned” to fight aggressors already encountered). From innate immunity, science thought almost everything: “There has been a golden age of discoveries, since the late 1990s, but many specialists in the field thought that key proteins were now known”smiles Enzo Poirier, team leader at the Institut Curie within the Immunity and Cancer Unit (Institut Curie, Inserm). But a new pool of immune proteins, that is as many therapeutic targets, could hide in our evolutionary history …
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