Targeting Antibiotic Tolerance, Pathogen by Pathogen

Targeting Antibiotic Tolerance, Pathogen by Pathogen.

Antibiotic tolerance, the capacity of genetically susceptible bacteria to survive the lethal effects of antibiotic treatment, plays a critical and underappreciated role in the disease burden of bacterial infections. Here, we take a pathogen-by-pathogen approach to illustrate the clinical significance of antibiotic tolerance and discuss how the physiology of specific pathogens in their infection...

Pathogen Induced Tolerance

Using a dynamic model we study the adaptive immune response to a sequence of two infections. As expected, memory cells generated by the first (primary) infection generate rapid response when the secondary infection is identical (homologous). When the secondary infection is different (heterologous), the memory cells have a positive effect or no effect at all. In exceptional instances in nature t...

Pathogen Reduction of Plasma

Immunological tolerance: Danger –  pathogen on the premises!

The March 22 issue of Science carried three articles [1–3] that claim to challenge a key principle of immunology, called self–non-self discrimination, by examining neonatal tolerance. These papers demonstrate that newborn mice can make immune responses if the antigen is appropriately presented. Is this a refutation of self–non-self discrimination as the authors believe? And does it prove the ‘d...

Evolutionary dynamics of pathogen resistance and tolerance.

Host organisms can respond to the threat of disease either through resistance defenses (which inhibit or limit infection) or through tolerance strategies (which do not limit infection, but reduce or offset its fitness consequences). Here we show that resistance and tolerance can have fundamentally different evolutionary outcomes, even when they have equivalent short-term benefit for the host. A...