91 questions · 45 sources · 0 syntheses
Immunology
The study of the immune system and its responses.
Source-derived questions
Questions extracted from the papers in this topic, excluding the curated questions above.
- How can the immune system generate roughly a billion distinct antibodies from only about 20,000 genes?
- How did Baruj Benacerraf's work on MHC genes explain why organ transplants fail?
- How did Bordet's complement-fixation test work, and why could it be applied to any antigen-antibody pair?
- How did Burnet and Medawar's discovery eventually lead to preventing rejection in transplanted organs?
- How did Burnet propose the immune system learns to distinguish 'self' from foreign tissue during embryonic development?
- How did George Snell's mouse skin-graft experiments lead to the discovery of the major histocompatibility complex?
- How did Porter's use of the enzyme papain reveal the separate functional parts of an antibody?
- How did Steinman use his own dendritic cell discovery to treat his pancreatic cancer?
- How did checkpoint inhibitor drugs change outcomes for patients with metastatic melanoma?
- How did discovering integrins change the view of the extracellular matrix from purely structural to signalling?
- How did phage display lead to therapeutic antibodies used for rheumatoid arthritis and cancer?
- How did prolonged kissing reduce allergic skin responses in patients with eczema and hay fever?
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- How did studying a mouse strain that attacked its own organs lead Brunkow and Ramsdell to the FOXP3 gene?
- How do bacteria use CRISPR and Cas9 as a natural immune system against viruses?
- How do bacteria use CRISPR as an immune memory against viruses?
- How do dendritic cells activate T-cells to start an immune response?
- How do dendritic cells bridge the innate and adaptive immune systems?
- How do modern vaccines and targeted cancer therapies draw on both Mechnikov's and Ehrlich's discoveries?
- How do the CTLA-4 and PD-1 checkpoints let tumours suppress an immune attack?
- How does CRISPR-Cas9 function as a bacterial immune system against viruses?
- How does MHC restriction explain why an organ transplant is rejected by one animal but accepted by its clone?
- How does anaphylaxis differ from the protective effect of vaccination?
- How does chronic ER stress from the unfolded protein response contribute to type 2 diabetes?
- How does fusing a spleen cell with a myeloma cell produce a hybridoma that manufactures one antibody forever?
- How does the Y-shaped antibody model inform the design of modern monoclonal antibody drugs?
- How does the enzyme cGAS detect misplaced DNA and trigger the STING pathway?
- How does understanding antibody gene shuffling help explain autoimmune disease and inform vaccine design?
- How long did Louis Washkansky survive after the transplant, and what ultimately caused his death?
- How might regulatory T cells explain why some cancers evade the immune response?
- How quickly did diphtheria antitoxin move from laboratory discovery to manufactured treatment for children?
- In what ways did Bordet's mechanistic view of immunity lay groundwork for blood typing and allergy research?
- What are dendritic cells and how did Ralph Steinman discover their role in the immune system?
- What are integrins, and how do they connect the extracellular matrix to a cell's internal cytoskeleton?
- What are the A, B, O, and AB blood groups, and what causes blood from different groups to clot when mixed?
- What biological processes do prostaglandins regulate in the body?
- What clinical treatments now rely on drugs that block integrin activity?
- What did Doherty and Zinkernagel discover about how killer T cells recognize infected cells, beyond simply spotting foreign proteins?
- What did Feldmann and Maini discover about tumour necrosis factor alpha's role in rheumatoid arthritis?
- What did Mechnikov observe in starfish larvae that led him to discover phagocytosis?
- What did Niels Jerne's network theory contribute to understanding immune regulation?
- What did Paul Ehrlich mean by a 'magic bullet' and where did the concept come from?
- What did Sakaguchi observe when he removed a specific population of T cells from mice?
- What did Susumu Tonegawa discover in the 1970s about how immune cells shuffle gene segments?
- What did von Behring discover in the blood serum of animals that had survived diphtheria?
- What do the Fab and Fc regions of an antibody each do?
- What do the proteins CTLA-4 and PD-1 do to suppress T cell activity?
- What does it mean that the immune response is 'lendable' between animals?
- What downstream medical practices, like cancer immunotherapy and vaccine design, depend on this principle of self-plus-foreign recognition?
- What effects did injected histamine produce in experimental animals that resembled anaphylaxis?
- What experiment did Medawar run on mice to prove Burnet's theory of acquired immune tolerance?
- What immune barriers make transplanting a pig organ into a human so difficult, and how do they cause hyperacute rejection?
- What immunosuppression protocols did E. Donnall Thomas develop to make bone marrow transplants work between unrelated people?
- What is IPEX disease, and how does it confirm that FOXP3 plays the same role in humans as in mice?
- What is complement, and how does the heat-sensitive protein system Bordet called alexin help destroy bacteria?
- What is phage display, and how does it let researchers find peptides that bind a specific target?
- What is streptokinase, and what future medical use did its discovery point toward?
- What is the HLA system that Jean Dausset identified, and how did he find it using human blood donors?
- What is the difference between the innate and adaptive immune responses?
- What is the difference between the reticular theory and the neuron doctrine of the nervous system?
- What is the modern cellular explanation for anaphylactic shock?
- What is the unfolded protein response and how does it let a cell detect misfolded proteins?
- What later fields of science and industry grew out of Tiselius's separation method?
- What made blood transfusions so dangerous before Landsteiner's discovery?
- What made the 2013 clinical trial results in metastatic melanoma different from prior cancer treatments?
- What other autoimmune diseases have since been treated with the anti-TNF therapy family?
- What range of modern conditions are now treated with anti-inflammatory steroids derived from this discovery?
- What role do Toll-like receptors play in detecting bacterial infection?
- What role does immunoglobulin A play in the body's immune defences?
- What was Richet actually trying to measure when he discovered anaphylaxis?
- What was the central disagreement between the neuron doctrine and the reticular theory of the nervous system?
- What work did Tonegawa and Leder share credit for in the 1987 Lasker Award?
- Why did Joseph Murray's 1954 kidney transplant between identical twins succeed where transplants between unrelated people failed?
- Why did Science call checkpoint blockade a new category of treatment rather than just a new drug?
- Why did a second, smaller dose of toxin prove more dangerous than the first?
- Why did organs transplanted using Carrel's techniques eventually fail even though the surgery itself worked?
- Why did the Nobel committee award the prize jointly to two scientists with seemingly conflicting theories of immunity?
- Why did the immune system destroy synthetic mRNA before Karikó and Weissman's discovery?
- Why do bacteria have enzymes that cut up viral DNA at specific sites in the first place?
- Why do neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and ALS involve the same pathway Mori and Walter mapped?
- Why does mixing incompatible blood types cause red cells to clump together?
- Why does the body sometimes release histamine in error against harmless substances like pollen or peanuts?
- Why does the body's immune system normally destroy synthetic mRNA before it can work?
- Why does the immune system often fail to attack tumours even after T cells infiltrate them?
- Why had organ transplants been failing for decades even when surgeons could perform the operation flawlessly?
- Why is the antibody-generation mechanism described as a combinatorial trick rather than a stored blueprint?
- Why was Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia considered such a rare warning sign in otherwise healthy young men?
- Why was Ralph Steinman's prize allowed to stand despite his death before the announcement?
- Why was Steinman's 2011 Nobel Prize an unusual case for the committee?
- Why was sequencing the complete amino acid chain of an IgG antibody such a major undertaking for Edelman?
- Why was the hypothesis that TNF drives joint destruction considered contentious at first?
- Why were people born before 1957 partially protected from the 2009 H1N1 virus?
Sources
- CRISPR gene editing named Breakthrough of the Year
- CRISPR-Cas9 demonstrated as a programmable genome editor in human cells
- Cancer immunotherapy named Science's Breakthrough of the Year
- First clinical report of AIDS in the United States
- First human heart transplant
- First pig kidney transplanted into a living human recipient
- H1N1 influenza pandemic declared by WHO
- Identification of histamine
- Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine
- Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine
- Landsteiner discovers blood groups
- Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)
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- Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)
- Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)
- Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)
- Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)
- Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)
- Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research)
- Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine