Articles in 2021

David Schneider explains the concept of disease tolerance and describes the first observations of this phenomenon in animal models.

Beth Stevens and Matthew Johnson discuss the unexpected finding that classical complement components guide synaptic pruning in the brain and are necessary for healthy brain function.

Eicke Latz recalls the discovery of the inflammasome in 2002 and how it revolutionized our understanding of inflammation and is now a target of new immunotherapeutics for inflammatory disease.

Shohei Hori recalls the early work that led to the identification of FOXP3 as the master regulator of regulatory T cells.

Mihai Netea tells us how the dichotomy of innate and adaptive immunity was blurred with the description of trained immunity in 2012 — a process by which innate immune cells and their progenitors store memory of past infections by epigenetic reprogramming.

Martin Guilliams and Charlotte Scott summarize some of the key studies that led to a refined dendritic cell nomenclature system based on ontogeny.

Gwendalyn Randolph reminds us of how our view of macrophage origin and identity has drastically changed over the past 15 years.

As we celebrate 20 years since the launch of Nature Reviews Immunology, we reflect on how far the field of immunology has advanced over the past two decades.

In this Perspective, the authors propose that innate immune detection of oxidized phospholipids, which result from tissue injury, allows the immune system to assess the degree of danger; the detection of oxidized phosphocholines in the presence of pathogen-associated molecular patterns or damage-associated molecular patterns triggers a heightened immune response.

A new study explores the links between diet and colorectal cancer risk by showing that changes to the intestinal microbiome in mice fed a high-fat diet result in attenuated MHC class II expression by intestinal stem cells and hence impaired immune surveillance of tumour initiation.

Muhammad Suleman Rana and colleagues from the National Institute of Health in Pakistan discuss the urgent need to implement catch-up vaccination programmes for measles and polio to prevent resurgence of these deadly diseases.

In this Perspective, McInnes and Gravallese highlight the remarkable progress made over the past 20 years in treating immune-mediated inflammatory diseases. The available therapies have progressed from broad-spectrum immune modulators to highly targeted biological and small-molecule agents as our understanding of disease mechanisms has advanced.

This Comment article proposes that T cell-oriented vaccine strategies should be considered to control the COVID-19 pandemic in the longer term, given declining levels of neutralizing antibodies with time after vaccination or infection and the emergence of viral escape variants.

CD8⁺ tissue resident memory T cells (T_RM cells) are essential for defence against pathogens and malignancies. Prior work had indicated that these cells form within inflamed tissue, but there is emerging evidence that a pool of T_RM cell precursors exists within the circulation. This Review examines the processes and signals within the lymphoid compartment that determine lineage decisions towards the formation of T_RM cells.

Atherosclerosis involves a maladaptive inflammatory response. This Review summarizes the contributions of key innate and adaptive immune cell subsets and describes diverse mechanisms that regulate their activation. It also discusses the feasibility of developing immune-targeted interventions, such as tolerogenic vaccines.

This Progress article provides an update on the COVID-19 vaccine effort in the light of ongoing vaccine efficacy studies and real-world data on vaccine effectiveness, including the impact of virus variants of concern and challenges for global deployment.