IMMUNE SYSTEM

The immune system, unlike other organ systems, is not restricted to a particular structure
or set of structures. It is a diffused system of body responses that limit other organisms ability
to use our body tissues as an environment for them to live and reproduce. Just like any
organism, everything that we think of as a pathogen, everything that we think of as something
that causes compromise in our bodys function and therefore is a pathogenic process and causes
illness, is caused by an organism that simply wants a place to live, and wants a place to make
babies; unfortunately for us, some of those places include the tissues of our body, and so there
are organisms that use our body surfaces and our internal environments as their home, and
unfortunately in the process of populating our tissues, and reproducing, they actually
compromise the function of those tissues, and cause pathology.
At this point in time, if we look at the composition of your body, you have about 4 trillion
cells populating your body. How many cells do you have of other organisms that are living on or
in your body? 4 trillionas many cells of other organisms living on or in your body as you have
body cells. You are not a sterile world. You are a confluence of other organisms, and it is
actually a good thing. Has anyone ever lived in a dorm? Have you ever lived on a floor where
everyone gets along and it is a wonderful place? Let us pretend that you did. And then one
person moves out, and is replaced by the biggest jerk on the planet. What has happened to the
wonderful place that you were living in where everyone sat around and singing kumbaya and
making smores? It is replaced by an environment that is uncomfortable and unpleasant, and you
do not want to come back to your dorm because your roommates boyfriend is there again.
Having things living on your is not a bad thing because it eliminates the possibility that you have
a really crappy roommate; if you are healthy, all the organisms living on or in you are living in a

commensurate relationship with you, they are not causing pathology, but are simply coexisting
with you, just as we coexist with other parts of the complex ecosystem that we live in. The
immune system is not there to eliminate other non-you cells, it is there to control pathogenesis, it
is there to prevent other organisms from compromising your basic functions, but having things
living on you is fine. Every surface of your body, and every body opening, is a confluence of
organisms. Your mouth is a filthy place. If you took a swab and you cultured it, it is amazing
what is growing in there. And everything you eatif you have a salad, I do not know how many
hundreds of millions of other organisms you have just eaten. Most of them are not pathogenic
though, and most of them die in your digestive tract.
The immune system is this collection of different types of body responses to organisms
that have introduced themselves within the tissues of your body and are causing compromise to
the functioning of those tissues. There are two general kinds of responses: there is a nonspecific
collection of responses and a specific collection of responses. The difference between specific
and nonspecific is simply whether the immune system uniquely recognizes the pathogen, or if it
simply knows okay, it is not part of this body. In the nonspecific responses, the immune
system is simply eliminating non-self cells, but it does not know their identityit just knows that
they do not belong where they are. Whereas in the specific responses, the body can uniquely
identify the pathogen, know its unique properties, and be able to respond against it and only it.
Nonspecific Immune Responses
Let us talk about nonspecific immunity first. Believe it or not, the most important part of
the immune system is your skin, and it is a very complex organ, and it is first of all a physical
barrier. The surface of the skin is not alive; the outer 30-50 cell layers are dead plasma
membranes that just have keratin integrated into their plasma membranes to make them very

durable, so it creates an impermeable outer surface that other cells cannot migrate through. They
may be able to live on top of it, but they cannot penetrate through it and reach into the inner
tissues of the body, and since the outer surface of the skin is not alive, having this other organism
living on it really does not do you any harm. Besides that, the skin produces a number of
antibacterial secretions that actually limit particular types of bacteria living on it; it is also acidic,
it has a pH less than 7. It is not acidic enough to cause mechanical harm to some other cells, but
it is called an acid mantel, it is acidic enough to select against certain organisms. So the skin is a
physical barrier, and in addition, integrated within the skin itself are wandering immune cells,
macrophages. In case something does penetrate the outer layers, the immune system is sitting
there in wait, in case it encounters a pathogen.
Other aspects of the physical barrier of the body are that all the openings to the various
organ systems that are continuous with the outside world have what are called mucous
membranes. They are specialized membrane systems that include immune cells within those
tissues to protect against infection. Unfortunately, there are viruses that infect certain types of
immune cells, for example HIV infects dendritic cells and helper T cells, so when the mucous
membrane encounters the HIV virus, it is actually vulnerable to infection, and certain types of
behaviors that humans engage in that introduce the HIV virus onto mucus membranes make an
individual susceptible to an HIV infection. The mucous membranes of the openings of our
various systems, whether it is our reproductive system, our digestive system, or our respiratory
system, provide some protection. Also, because we ingest materials from the environment to
obtain nutrients, what we ingest also have other organisms associated with it. If you eat any kind
of fresh vegetable, it has a lot of stuff growing on it that is not the vegetable itself. Fortunately
for you, the acidity of your stomach fluids is about 2, it is very acidic, it kills just about anything,

except for things that are covered by glycoproteins. Hydrochloric acid does not break the
glycoprotein down and it can pass through the stomach into your intestines, and that is why we
get those nasty intestinal viruses that upset the digestive tract, because they can survive the
stomach.
Probably the most important protection you have is the separation between you and the
outside world, which is the various membranes that are on the surface of the body. Have you
ever tugged at a piece of skin at the edge of your cuticle or something, and two days later it is
inflamed and red and sensitive? Because what you did was you tore the outer surface of the
body, exposing the tissues underneath it, and because you have all kinds of bacteria living on the
surface, you self inoculated your dermal tissue and some of your resident pathogens
unfortunately infected the tissue that is no longer protected. Interesting, since our whole body is
covered by organisms living in a commensurate relationship with each other, they do not cause
infections, because there is no physical opportunity, they are all a confluence. Sometimes
though, we inadvertently disrupt that flora of our bodies. Sometimes if someone has some type
of bacterial infection and you put them on an antibiotic, the antibiotic not only will select against
the pathogen, it will also disrupt the natural flora that is living on or in the body, and we end up
with other types of infections. It is common for women, for example, when they are taking an
antibiotic to get a yeast infection, because one of the resident components of our flora are yeast;
when the yeast are mixed within a population of bacteria, they do not grow very rapidly and do
not cause symptomatology, but if you kill off the bacteria, then the yeast start turning over cars,
setting things on fire, just being rude. When we refer to the flora, it is combination of organisms
that is all it is.

Let us talk about other nonspecific mechanisms. The next nonspecific mechanism you
have is specialized cells whose job is to eat other things, other organisms and cellular debris.
You have a population called phagocidic cells, they phagocitize other materials and other cells.
There are four or five different kinds of phagocidic cells. Most pathogens are ultimately eaten,
no matter what the other processes are, because we still have to eliminate them somehow. The
first type is called nutrophils. Nutrophils are immune cells, and the only problem with a
nutrophil is that when it is activated and it destroys some other organism, it also dies, so it only
works once, it can only participate in one single immune response. The next type is called an
eocitaphil. An eocitaphil, although it is involved in a number of different reactions, its primary
function is to target parasitic worms. In the western world, we do not worry too much about
parasites living in our bodies, but there are parts of the world where there are some really nasty
waterborne parasites that use the human as a part of its complex reproductive cycle. Eocitaphils
are also phagocidic, but what they attack are various stages of the parasitic worms life cycle.
The next type are called monocytes. Monocytes, when they encounter some type of foreign
material, become macrophosages. Macro meaning big, and phosg meaning eat, they are very
large cells and are permanent parts of the immune system. Once a monocyte differentiates into a
macrophosge, it becomes a permanent resident part of the body, there to consume and eat foreign
material and foreign cells. The last kind of phagocydic cell is called NK cells, natural killer
cells. They do not target foreign cells, they target your own cells, so when a cell is functioning
suboptimally, growing too fast, getting too big, replicating too often, what we would consider a
precancerous cell, the NK cells will kill cells that are functioning suboptimally and destroy them
before they become cancerous. When individuals are immunocompromised, they often develop
lots of types of cancers, because their NK cells are not functioning properly.

The next thing that we want to talk about is what happens when a pathogen is introduced
into the tissue of the body. Let us say this is your skin here, and you inadvertently step on
something sharp and introduce some nasty pathogen under your skin. Now the pathogen is no
longer on the surface of the body where it is nothing to worry about, now it is inside the tissue of
the body. Now we have this pathogen that is inside the tissues of our body, how does the
immune system respond to this? There are a couple requirements: first, we have to know where
this process is going on. There are no little sensors out there in the periphery detecting where it
was, so we need a mechanism that tells the immune system, look at the problems over here.
The other thing is, the immune system is generally not out in general circulation, it is not out
there in the body at all times. It is held in reserve, most of your immune cells are being stored in
your lymph tissue, and other than a few immune cells that are out in circulation on patrol, most
of them are sitting quietly, dormantly in your lymph tissue, because running your immune system
is energy intensive. When you are sick, you become very weak and feeble, and lie pathetically
moaning for days. You do not want your immune system active, except only when you need it.
We have to tell the immune system where the problem is and we have to deliver the immune
system to that site. How does that happen? First of all, when we introduced our undesired
visitor here, the injury actually injured other cells of the body too. Those injured body cells are
producing a class of chemicals called cytocons, and there are hundreds of them. One type of
cytocon acts as a chemoattractant, attracting the immune system to where the cytocons are in the
highest concentration. The cytocon is going to be most concentrated at the injury site, and the
immune cells, almost like a trail of bread crumbs back to the injury site, can follow the
concentration of that chemical to the point where it is most concentrated, which will be in the
injury site. But the immune system is housed in the circulatory system and the lymphatic system

how do we get it out of the circulatory system and into the interstitial space where this
infection is going on? We need to deliver it via the circulatory system and then we need to
change the characteristics of the circulatory system to let the immune system enter into the
tissue. We need to vasodialate, we need to increase the blood vessel flow and diameter in the
area of the injury. Within this tissue, vasophyls, which are another kind of immune cell, and
mass cells, produce histamine. Histamine is a naturally occurring vasodialator that is going to
vasodialate the capillary beds in the injured area. If you have ever seen a little tiny injury, like
one you incurred by tugging on the tissue around your cuticle, it gets red and inflamed and
swollen, and that is because the mass cells and vasophyls are releasing histamine and
vasodialating, and when vessels vasodialate, fluids leave the circulatory system and it gets
swelling in that tissue. Once the immune cells get to the infection site, the immune cells have a
particular property that lets them merge with and cross the cells that make up a capillary bed,
called diapedisis. The immune cells will enter the vascular bed that is dilated, walk across the
capillary wall, and now they are integrated now with the tissues and are free to consume it.
The next type of nonspecific responding is a group of responses called antimicrobial
proteins and these are pretty complicated systems, I am just going to identify them and tell you
what they do. There is a combination of proteins that work collectively in the immune system,
called the compliment system, and I am not talking about providing some positive feedback
about some quality that you possess, I am talking about things that go well together. The
compliment system is often activated during other kinds of immune responses. When antibodies
are made, they often activate the compliment system, it sort of augments other types of immune
responses. The compliment system is a system of interrelated proteins, and there are many
things that it can do, but one thing that it does is, when activated, it produces a particular type of

substance called a periphery. If something is perpherated, it has holes. A peripherin is a protein

made by the compliment system that disrupts the plasma membrane of cells. If this were
bacteria causing an infection, the peripherin would break down the plasma membrane wall and
then it would die, because its plasma membrane was disrupted.
The last antimicrobial system that we are going to talk about is called the interferons,
derived from the word to interfere. Viruses are not technically alive, they do not eat, they do not
metabolize, they are reproductive machines, and they cannot do it by themselves, to make their
components and to duplicate their genetic material, they need the host cells cellular machinery
to do it. They integrate themselves into our cells, and they use those cells to make copies of
themselves. When a body cell gets infected by a virus, the body cell is going to die, there is
nothing we can do about it, but the cell itself can respond and warn its neighbors. It can signal to
its neighbors, look, Im infected, stop replicating so that you do not get infected. So they will
express a particular gene sequence and produce what are called interferons, and the interferons
are picked up by other body cells, and if the body cell stops replicating, then it cannot be
infected. The purpose here is not necessarily to save the cells; what most pathogenesis comes
from, is that when other organisms successfully reproduce in your body, they compromise the
functioning of wherever they are, and so if we have this virus that is this perfect reproductive
machine, and all it is doing is churning out little baby viruses more than the immune system can
handle, then eventually it is going to cause pathogenesis. The idea here is, if I stop the cells from
replicating, then the virus stops replicating, then the immune system can get caught up. If the
immune cells can eliminate the virus faster than the virus can replicate, then you do not get
pathogenesis. This is a strategy that the body has, to impose conditions on these pathogens to
make it difficult to successfully reproduce, then the immune system can come along and

eliminate them. That is why when you are sick you might get a high fever, and the reason for the
high fever is your body is saying, look, they like me at 98.6 degrees, how do they like 103.2!
So we create a condition that is less than optimal for the pathogen, giving the immune system an
advantage over the pathogen.
In a nonspecific response, the immune cells would respond to anything that was not of
the body, but in specific responses, each lymphocyte only responds to a single antigen. Let us
talk about what an antigen is to begin with. The best way to think about an antigen is its physical
characteristics that can be recognized. Let us say that this is our pathogen here, the pathogen has
physical attributes that can be recognized and it is usually something on the surface of the cell,
some type of glycoprotein that is unique to that organism. The immune cell is going to have to
have an antigen receptor that recognizes only this antigen, so each immune cell that participates
in a specific immune response has only one type of antigen receptor and can only recognize this
one pathogen because of this physical characteristic. When you were born, you were born with
all your immune cells already, and the capacity to recognize every possible antigen on the planet.
You do not develop those capacities over your lifetime as a consequence of your experiences,
you were born with them.
In addition to having specificity, there is also diversity. Diversity refers to there being
many different ways that the immune system can respond to a single pathogen. The two basic
types of immune responses are called humoral responses and cell mediated responses. Humoral
refers to something that is in the fluids of the body, so if it is in your blood, or lymph, or
interstitial spaces. The other response is cell mediated, and in that circumstance the pathogen has
integrated itself into the cells of our body and they are invisible to the immune system because
they are residing within your cells, and as a consequence the immune system cannot see them, so

the cell that is infected has to convert into what is called the APC, the antigen presenting cell; the
actual infected cell will present antigen on its own surface and signal the immune system that it
is in fact no longer a normal body cell and the immune response should be directed against it.
The specific immune system also gives us self and nonself recognition. The immune
system is able to recognize the bodys own cells, and therefore if the cell is not of the body, then
even if it is not pathogenic, it is still going to elicit an immune response. Another characteristic
of the specific immune system, besides being able to recognize individual antigens, it also forms
memory against them, and that is a very important property because if you know you have seen
something in the past, you can alter your future responding to that antigen. If we have an
immune cell that is going to participate in an immune response, it is going to do two things: it is
going to form what are called effector cells, and those are the ones that are involved in the
response, and it is also going to form memory cells. Once an immune cell encounters an antigen,
it is activated, and once activated it undergoes two clonal divisions, it just clones itself, makes
multiple copies of itself. One population of cloned cells are effector cells, and they are involved
in the actual response against the antigen. The other cells are a clonal population that recognize
the antigen and are held in reserve in case that body ever encounters that antigen again. In
subsequent exposures to the antigen, you will have many more cells that can respond to that
antigen, and in most circumstances you will not experience any type of symptomology, so the
basis for resistance to infection is memory cells. But just because you are immune to something
or resistant to a particular pathogen, does not mean you are not infected, it just means the nature
of the response is so rapid and robust that you do not experience symptoms. In vaccination, we
will intentionally expose you to some antigenic characteristic without the pathogenesis, so we
would give you some type of tenuated virus or some component of a bacteria that contains the

antigen but the virus or bacteria are not competent, so they cannot cause infection; you would
make memory of the antigen, but you will never have the initial infection. Most of our resistance
is acquired simply because we have been exposed to things naturally, vaccines are an artificial
kind of immunity.
There are also different types of immune cells; there are B cells and T cells. The B and
the T refer to the site in the body where maturation took place; the B cells mature in bone
marrow, the T cells mature in the thymus. Most of this maturation occurs during the very early
stages of our lives, so right now your thymus is not very big but when you were very young, it
was, because you had a lot of immune cells being formed and maturing. The B cells mature in
the bone; they are involved in the humoral response and they produce antibodies. The T cells
mature in the thymus; they are involved in the cell mediated response.
Our immune cells are primarily dormant, they are inactive when not involved in a
response to in infection, so in order for immune cells to participate in a response, they have to be
induced. Each immune cell recognizes only a single antigen, once it encounters that antigen,
then the immune cell becomes activated, and then the immune cells will divide and differentiate
and will produce a clonal population of effector cells, and what type of cell that might be
depends on the nature of the response; if it is a humoral response, the effector cell will be a
plasma cell, which make antibodies; if it is a cell mediated response the effector cells will be
helper T cells, or cytotoxic T cells. In addition, they differentiate and form memory cells, and
those are simply cells that can recognize the antigen but will not participate in the initial
response.
You encounter a pathogen, then there is some lag, some delay, you reach some maximum
level of responding, it stays elevated for a duration of time, usually sufficiently long enough to

eliminate the pathogen, and then the response ends, and the immune cells become dormant again.
The lag is the time it takes to reach 50% of max responding, the half life is a measure of the
duration of the response, and that represents the amount of time it takes to reach max responding
and return back to half max. The primary response is the one that you would see in the body
when the immune system encounters a novel pathogen, one it has never seen before, then some
time passes in our lives and we are exposed to something we saw in our childhood, when we see
that same pathogen again, if it is a specific response, we are not going to have a primary response
but a secondary response. The lag time will decrease, the time it takes to see the effect, and the
half life will be lengthened as well as the magnitude of the response. The secondary response
will have a quicker onset, it will last longer, and it will have a greater magnitude, and under most
circumstances during the secondary response you will not experience symptomology, you will
still be exposed to the pathogen, because the immune response is so rapid, so robust, and last
long enough to make sure there are no symptoms.
The next thing we want to talk about is the ability of the immune system to recognize the
bodys own cells. It is all dependent on cell surface receptors that are present on our bodys
cells. There are two types of receptors that are involved in self and nonself recognition. All
nucleated body cells have a type of receptor called a major histrocompatibility complex, an
MHC. There are two different types of it, there is class 1 and class 2; class 1 are on all nucleated
cells, any cell in your body that has a nucleus will also have on its plasma membrane MHC class
1. There are hundreds of different genes coding for that complex and thousands of different
alleles for each one of those genes. So each one of us is going to have a unique MHC; if you
take a hundred different genes, each with a thousand alleles and figure out the statistical
probability that two individual are going to have the same combination, it is impossible. Even

identical twins have different MHC class 1s. Every individual has a unique MHC on their
nucleated cells. Some people ask, then how can we donate blood to each other if the immune
cells are going to recognize any nonself cells as an antigen, because red blood cells do not have
nuclei and so when you donate blood, you donate red blood cells, and once they mature they do
not have nuclei therefore they do not have genes to express and do not express MHCs, so people
can donate blood so long as the other antigenetic characteristics, the A-B complexs and Rh
factors match.
The other class of MHCs are class 2, and these are only on immune cells. Class 2
MHCs allow the immune cells to essentially verify that any cell it encounters has the
appropriate class 1 MHC, you can almost think of it as two complimentary structures. This is
your body cell here, and this is its class 1 MHC, and this is our immune cell up here with its class
2 MHC, and essentially the class 2 MHC verifies the physical characteristics of the class 1. If
the class 1 characteristics are appropriate then the immune cell will not direct immune action
against it, but if it is different, then the immune cell will treat it like it is an antigen, and then
direct immune action against it. Immune systems also have class 1 MHCs, that is why we cannot
donate immune cells to each other.
The next thing we want to talk about are different types of immune responses, and there
are lots of them, we are just going to talk about two prototypic types of immune responses and
their basic characteristics. First we will talk about humoral responses. Humoral responses are
ones that produce antibodies. There are two basic types of humoral responses: there is a T
independent responses and a T dependent response. In T independent responses, there are no
memory cells. Both responses produce antibodies, but there are no memory cells made in a T
independent response. In a T dependent, there is memory. To get a T dependent response, the B

cell has to be activated by a T cell, so the T cell encounters the antigen, recognizes it, activates
the B cell. In a T independent response, the B cell is activated by the antigen directly. Here is
our B cell, and the B cell has on its surface antigen receptors, which are actually antibodies that
are imbedded in its membrane. The B cell encounters the antigen and then is activated, and if
this is a T independent response, then you are going to form plasma cells only and the plasma
cells are going to make antibodies. If the pathogen activated a T cell, which then activated the B
cell, then you do not just get plasma cells, you also get memory cells. Plasma cells are formed in
both circumstances, and in both circumstances you are going to form antibodies, but in one
circumstance you are also going to form memory cells so that if you ever encounter that
pathogen again, you will produce even more antibodies, but if it is not T dependent, that is if the
T cell does not activate the B cell but the antigen, then you do not get memory.
Now let us talk about antibodies and what they do. Antibodies are a class of proteins
called immunoglobulins and the immunoglobulins are complex proteins that have multiple
protein components to them, they sort of look like a Y in their structure. They are multiple
protein subunits that are all assembled together, and on the protein are different functional
regions. One region can bind the antigen, so there will be an antigen binding region; another
region will be able to activate macrophages; another region will activate the compliment system.
An antibody is a very complex protein molecule that has different functional regions that allow it
activate other immune responses. The antibody itself cannot eliminate the pathogen; it cannot
kill the pathogen, it cannot eliminate it from the body. All it can do is bind to antigens on the
pathogen, all it can do is bind. In order to eradicate the pathogen, to eliminate it, something else
has to happen. Let us talk about what kinds of things can happen to dispose of the antigen.
Initially, all the antibody can do is tag the antigen, bind with it, and say here it is, come do

something about this pathogen I found over here. The actual production of the
immunoglobulant is made by the B cell, by the plasma cell. When the B cell is activated, it is
gene expression by the B cell that synthesizes and produces and secretes the antibody. They
have a half life of anywhere between ten days and three weeks, so if you are exposed to some
kind of antigen today, in a couple days you would make some antibodies, they would stay in
your body, circulating, tagging the antigen, for a couple weeks, and then they would be cleared
from the body like any other protein that is floating around the bloodstream.
There are different kinds of immunoglobulins, they are abbreviated IG; there are IGMs,
and IGGs, and IGAs, and IGDs, and IGEs. How do we get rid of the antigen if the antibody
cannot actually destroy the organism possessing the antigen, how in fact does antibody assist in
clearing the antigen from the body? There are different effector mechanisms. One mechanism is
simply that the antibody will coat the surface of either a virus or some type of bacterial toxin.
Viruses need to attach to our cells, and introduce themselves or their genetic material into the
cell, so all antibodies do is coat all the attachment sites to prevent the virus from binding with
our cells. Another thing that happens in pathology is sometimes various types of organisms will
make things that are toxic to our cells, lots of bacteria make toxins, and one thing the antibodies
can do is coat the entire surface of the toxin so the toxin cannot have an effect. Both of those
responses are examples of neutralization, so antibodies can neutralize things, they can prevent
viruses from integrating into our cells, they can prevent toxins from having effects on our cells.
Another thing that antibodies can do is that they can form cross links between other
antibodies and their antigens to create a complex. So if we have multiple antibodies all
complexing together, attaching to the pathogen, then we can bind up and make a complex of the
pathogen and this creates a very large complex and then the macrophages can come along and

gobble up the complex. This process is called aglutenation, which is a subcategory of something
called opsonization. opsonization is this process of binding antibodies that enhance macrophage
attachment. To opinize is simply to increase the ability of the macrophage to recognize the
pathogen by the antibody attaching to it. When multiple antibodies complex together, which is a
type of opsonization, it is called aglutinization. To obsinize is to make the pathogen more visible
to the macrophage. To agglutinate is to form a complex of opsinized pathogens, so it is an even
bigger collection. Some things that cause pathology are not living, but they are chemicals
produced by the pathogen, and those chemicals sometimes go into solution, and the immune
system cannot identify those because they are dissolved in the fluids of our body, so another
thing antibodies can do is to bind up these soluble antigens and by binding them all up, make the
concentration of them high enough to actually cause them to precipitate out of solution, and
become visible to the immune cells.
The last mechanism comes from the fact that antibodies have compliment activation sites
on them. Remember we said one of the nonspecific immune responses was to activate the
compliment system, so antibodies can activate the compliment system also. Each antibody has a
compliment activation site. Those are the basic effector mechanisms for antibodies.
The next thing we want to talk about are cell mediated responses. This is a body cell,
here is the class 1 MHC on that body cell, and this body cell has been infected by some type of
pathogen. The antigenetic characteristics of the pathogen are not visible to the immune system
because that pathogen is now hiding inside of the body cell, and since the body cell has all of the
normal plasma membrane characteristics that the immune system could detect, it allows the
pathogen to hide and divide inside of our body cells. So the cell itself will externalize
components of the pathogen and present them on the MHC of that cell, and this is called antigen

presentation. So the infected body cell becomes what is called an APC, an antigen presenting
cell, and the APC now has essentially adulterated its own MHC and now the immune system is
going to recognize this cell as a nonself cell and direct immune action against this cell. Now
how does the immune system recognize this cell? Well all of our immune cells have class 2
MHCs that can detect that this class 1 has been modified, and direct action against it. There is a
whole variety of different things that can happen, but one example of something that can happen
involves what are called helper T cells. We have helper T cells, and of course they have class 2
MHCs, and the helper T cell will encounter the APC and identify that the APC cell exists, so it
will bind with the APC. Now the helper T cell becomes activated and produces two clonal
populations, it produces memory helper Ts and effector helper Ts. The memory cells obviously
will not be involved in this response, the effector helper Ts will. Now we make a whole
population of helper Ts that can wander the body looking for other infected body cells, in
addition to this one. The helper T now signals to a variety of different chemicals, cytocons, other
immune cells. The typical response would be that a cytotoxic T cell will be activated and the
cytotoxic T cell will then direct action against this APC. The cytotoxic T cell will also form
effector cell and memory populations. So you have memory helper Ts and memory cytotoxic Ts
and effector cytotoxic. The cytotoxic cells get their name from cyto meaning cell, toxic meaning
toxic, the cytotoxic T cell disrupts the integrity of the plasma membrane of the APC, and by
destroying the plasma membrane the infected cell dies. It may also, at the very time, destroy the
plasma membrane of the pathogen. One of two things can happen: the pathogen also gets killed
in the process, or the pathogen is released, and now the pathogen is no longer inside of the cell, it
is now in the fluids of the body, and now you get a humoral response against the released
pathogen, and then you will make antibodies against the pathogen and then they will get

eradicated usually by some macrophage engulfing and eating it. The cytotoxic cell cannot be
activated by itself, it has to be activated by the helper T cells. When a person gets an HIV
infection, it kills off their helper Ts, and now they have no way to signal to the other immune
cells to deal with the pathogen.
The last thing that we want to talk about in regards to the immune system is acquired
immunity. You can acquire immunity either naturally or artificially. Prior to the advancement of
medical technology, there was no such thing as artificially acquired immunity, this is something
we can acquire because of medical technology that we have developed. Natural and artificial
acquired immunity can either be achieved actively or passively. What makes something active is
that you must have an immune response against it, and you must produce memory cells. Passive
natural acquired immunity is something that results when we receive resistance either across the
placenta or in milk from a lactating woman. In this case, the immunity that you have accessible
to you, either as a fetus in a uterus or breastfeeding, you have access to the antibodies made by
the woman; antibodies can pass through the placental barrier and get expressed in breast milk.
The fetus or the newborn has antibodies that the mother made, the idea there is that if the woman
is exposed to some pathogen then the fetus or newborn will be, so the antibodies get shared with
the fetus/newborn. On any given day, you are going to encounter antigens and pathogens, but
your immune system will hopefully prevent that pathogen form initiating an infection and
eradicate them without you experiencing symptoms. The woman does not have to be sick, only
exposed to an antigen. Active artificial acquired immunity has resulted from our ability to
produce vaccines. A vaccine is usually a tenuated form of some pathogen, it cannot cause the
disease but it has the antigenetic characteristics that induce the formation of memory cells. So
you get an immune response, you make memory, but you experience no symptoms. Passive

artificial acquired immunity is again something that is done in a medical context, again
antibodies, but not from a mother. These are usually antibodies that are made in a host organism,
usually a horse, harvest the antibodies from their bloodstream, and then given to a patient whose
immune system is compromised, who cannot make their own antibodies.