Immune Backup System

For this article, Karen Young Kreeger interviewed Joseph H. Phillips, senior staff scientist at DNAX Research Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology in Palo Alto, Calif. DNAX is a private research center funded by Schering-Plough. Data from the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that this paper has been cited significantly more often than the average paper of the same type and age. V.M. Braud, D.S.J. Allan, C.A. O'Callaghan, K. Soderstrom, A.D. Andrea, G.S. Ogg, S. Lazetic, N.T. Young, J.I. Bell, J.H. Phillips, L.L. Lanier, and A.J. McMichael, "HLA-E binds to natural killer cell receptors CD94/NKG2A, B, and C," Nature, 391:795-9, 1998. (Cited in about 183 papers since publication) The way the immune system responds to pathogens and distinguishes self from nonself is complex. For many years researchers thought that major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules, cell surface proteins that present unique host antigens, were the only way that ...