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Cytokines—strategic weapons in germ warfare?

Nature Biotechnology volume 21, pages 15–16 (2003)Cite this article

The threat posed by infectious agents to human health has increased considerably in recent years in part because of bioterrorism, the emergence of new pathogens, and the spread of antibiotic resistance. These developments have highlighted the need for new antimicrobial treatment and prevention strategies. Here, I suggest that one such strategy may be to use benign microbes, or commensals, as antimicrobial agents, harnessing their ability to skew the cytokine-chemokine network to an anti-infective set-point. A “periodic table” that would list the cytokines and chemokines associated with each microbe might reveal new fundamental mechanisms of microbial pathogenesis and predict which microbes would interfere with one another. It could also provide a new therapeutic approach against pathogenic viruses, a group of infectious agents for which there are currently relatively few treatment options.

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Figure 1: Interaction of microbes in the context of a living tissue.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to P. Murphy, O. Rennert, and V. Ivanov for many helpful discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Section of Intercellular Interactions, Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics,

    Leonid Margolis

  2. NASA/NIH Center for Three-Dimensional Tissue Culture at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, 20892, MD

    Leonid Margolis

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  1. Leonid Margolis
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Margolis, L. Cytokines—strategic weapons in germ warfare?. Nat Biotechnol 21, 15–16 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0103-15

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