Can innate immune adjuvants save vaccinology?
By Kate Travis
Indeed, what's old is new again. "We've known for a very long time that the body mounts an intense inflammatory response to microbes," says Bruce Beutler, professor of immunology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. Scientists even knew about what caused the response: In the 1890s Robert Koch and Richard Pfeiffer identified what they dubbed endotoxin, the complex molecule that coats Gram-negative bacteria. They found that endotoxin - later pegged specifically as lipopolysaccharide (LPS) - could induce fever and shock in guinea pigs.
Fly geneticists changed the name of the game. In 1996, scientists had learned that a fruit fly development gene called Toll also protected the flies from fungal infections. 2 In 1997, Janeway and Ruslan Medzhitov, then a postdoc at Yale, found that a known human gene, similar to the fly's Toll, could activate immune genes ...
