The Beautiful Cure by Daniel M Davis

Author:Daniel M Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

7 The Guardian Cells

If there’s any single take-home message from all of science, it’s that nothing is simple. Everything has depth. It sounds simple enough that our immune system defends us by attacking harmful invaders, but it isn’t. There are countless complications. The human body, which the immune system should not attack, changes over time; some bacteria are not harmful and do not require a response; dangerous germs try to avoid being detected, and so on. To achieve this simple-sounding mission – to discriminate between what requires a response and what doesn’t, and to deliver the right type of response – the human body has invested heavily in a galaxy of cells, proteins and other components, to create a system as elaborate as anything else we know of in the universe. And sometimes it fails.

As we have seen, one way your body tries to ensure that the immune system doesn’t attack healthy cells is that as immune cells are made in the body, from stem cells, they are tested as to whether or not they attack the body’s own healthy cells or tissues. Any that do so are killed off before they cause any harm. Only those immune cells that do not attack healthy cells are allowed to roam the body and search for signs of disease. But the process isn’t perfect, errors happen and healthy cells and tissues can be destroyed without good reason. This is the problem that underlies autoimmune disease.

There are over fifty different types of autoimmune disease – rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and so on – affecting around 5% of people, two thirds of whom are female.1 A big problem in treating autoimmune disease is that symptoms often take a long time to become apparent so that by the time somebody visits their physician, immune cells have often been attacking healthy cells for months if not years already. This makes it hard to work out precisely what triggered the immune system to attack healthy cells in the first place. In some cases, immune cells may have reacted to a protein molecule from a real threat, say a virus or bacteria, and then these same immune cells mistakenly react to a normal protein in healthy cells which just happens to be similar to the germ’s protein. But this isn’t always the case and there are crucial gaps in our understanding of how the immune system works which are important in developing new medicines for autoimmune diseases.

One reason why autoimmunity has been so difficult to understand is that everything about it is so deeply counter-intuitive. For most of history, the very idea that the human body can attack itself has hardly been considered a possibility. A modern view of disease began with Louis Pasteur’s discovery of minuscule microbes and Robert Koch’s discovery, in 1876, that microbes can cause disease. This replaced ancient views of disease which invoked, for example, an imbalance of the body’s ‘humours’: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood. As well as the uncountable

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