A recent discovery by scientists at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine holds hope for new approaches to the prevention and treatment of TB.
The team's discovery of a novel mechanism that may contribute to immune recognition of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) is published in the September issue of Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.
Most individuals with TB recover from the initial infection and become asymptomatic, but the bacterium persists for years, surviving largely inside macrophages, a type of cell that resides in the immune system.
This presents a public health problem in that TB can reactivate and cause serious disease or death. Researchers and physicians know the body's immune system is capable of containing the infection but not curing it completely. It begs the question: How does the organism survive in the human immune system for so many years?"
For the past 15 years, Drs. Clifford Harding and W. Henry Boom of Case Western Reserve have been seeking the answer to this question. Their work indicated that MTB can inhibit the ability of macrophages to stimulate infection-fighting immune responses, and they identified that a protein on macrophages called Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2) is involved in this immune evasion mechanism.
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