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    Nanoparticles and the Immune System: Safety and Effects
    Nanoparticles and the Immune System: Safety and Effects
    Nanoparticles and the Immune System: Safety and Effects
    Ebook234 pages2 hours

    Nanoparticles and the Immune System: Safety and Effects

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    Nanoparticles and the Immune System provides a reference text for toxicologists, materials scientists and regulators and covers the key issues of interaction of nanomaterials with the immune system. The book discusses several issues that toxicologists and regulators need to know: identification of endpoints that are relevant for assessing hazard, evaluating impact on immunologically frail populations, and how to evaluate chronic/cumulative effects. In addition, the book addresses the possibility of turning the immunomodulating properties of certain nanomaterials to our advantage for amplifying immune responses in certain diseases or preventive strategies (e.g. vaccination).

    • Identifies endpoints relevant for assessing hazardous situations, evaluating the impact on immunologically frail populations and how to gauge chronic/cumulative effects
    • Raises the awareness of the importance of knowing the effects of the new nanomaterials on our immune system
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAcademic Press
    Release dateNov 29, 2013
    ISBN9780124079212
    Nanoparticles and the Immune System: Safety and Effects

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      Book preview

      Nanoparticles and the Immune System - Diana Boraschi

      1

      How Innate and Adaptive Immunity Work

      Diana Boraschi,    CNR, Institute of Protein Biochemistry, Napoli, Italy

      The immune system encompasses two parallel and complementing activities, innate and adaptive immunity. When a dangerous event occurs or an agent is sensed as a danger, first innate immunity and later adaptive immunity get activated for defending the organism from damage. This chapter will introduce the reader to the basic concepts of immunity and how immunity acts in defending and maintaining the body’s physical and functional integrity. The putative challenge posed by nanoparticles will be examined within this framework.

      Keywords

      Innate immunity; adaptive immunity; phagocytes; lymphocytes; antibodies; defense

      1.1 The Immune System: Protecting the Body from Damage

      The human body exists in a hostile environment. Besides macroscopic dangers, the body needs to defend its integrity from the invisible attacks by infectious agents (bacteria, viruses, unicellular and multicellular parasites), poisons, and contaminants in air, water, and food. Other dangers come from within, those posed by the senescence, damage, or anomalous behavior of the body’s own cells and tissues.

      The survival and integrity of our body relies on a very sophisticated system of recognition of danger and of reaction to it, the immune system [1]. The immune system is a complex of cells and soluble factors, scattered throughout the entire body, which has the function of surveilling the body’s well-being, by detecting and eliminating potentially dangerous events/agents. The immune cells patrol the body, and in particular the areas more exposed to the external environment (skin, mucosal surfaces of lung, gut, and reproductive organs). Molecules or agents that pass the mechanical barriers (mucus, keratinized epithelium, mucosa) are sampled by immune cells, which decide whether the foreign element may represent a danger or not, and act consequently. If the nonself element is considered to be a threat, the immune system mounts a defensive reaction to destroy the agents that are considered as potentially dangerous.

      Which are the optimal characteristics of an effective immune response? Two are particularly important:

      1. Rapidity: The immune reaction must be fast, leaving no time to the dangerous agent to multiply and gain access to the inner body and cause serious damage.

      2. Specificity: The immune system must be able to discriminate between what is dangerous and what is not, so as to target the dangerous agent only and spare the surrounding cells and tissues.

      How can the immune system reach the opposing goals of being both rapid and specific? In fact, being quick means having no time for developing sophisticated specific weapons, it is like firing cannonballs, which may well destroy the target but also cause substantial collateral damage. On the other hand, being specific means that some time is required for designing and building the right tools, but the risk is that during this time the dangerous agent may further invade the organism and endanger its survival.

      This is why, in higher vertebrates including man, two immune systems are active in parallel. The innate immune system is the more primitive, rapid, and nonspecific system, with prebuilt weapons always ready to be fired. The adaptive immune system on the other hand is the sophisticated and highly specific system that, each time a dangerous agent comes in, builds new weapons specifically targeting that agent. The adaptive immune system has an additional characteristic, it can learn. This means that after having encountered a foreign agent and having designed and built the specific weapons, the cells of the system keep memory of what they have done and, if the same agent is encountered again (for instance an infective virus), the system can rebuild the specific weapons much faster and get rid of the infection much

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