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The lack of natural immunity against HIV has been a major hindrance to the search for immune correlates of protection. Here, the authors propose a new approach for clinical trials of HIV vaccine efficacy that should help to increase our chances of identifying immune correlates of protection.
This Perspective article describes the ways in which the intestinal microbiota can interact with the host immune system to promote both pro- and anti-inflammatory immune responses. The authors discuss the important implications of this for not only intestinal, but also for systemic inflammatory diseases.
This Opinion article describes the newly discovered conserved immunological and structural features of the sequence-variable regions of HIV-1 gp120, which the authors suggest warrant the reappraisal of these regions as vaccine targets.
This article outlines how helminth-derived immunomodulators can subvert pro-inflammatory responses by using host innate immune receptors to trigger divergent signalling pathways in antigen-presenting cells and proposes that these immunomodulators can be used as tools to dissect the pathways required to promote anti-inflammatory responses.
Invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells are thought to be autoreactive by 'design'. Here, Laurent Gapin describes how iNKT cell autoreactivity might be triggered and proposes that several self lipids are probably involved in the positive selection of iNKT cells and the autoreactivity of these cells in peripheral tissues.
Haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) can reside as dormant cells in endosteal niches in the bone marrow, where they are resistant to certain types of chemotherapy. In this article, the authors suggest that by first awakening dormant HSCs to become actively self-renewing cells, this resistance to chemotherapy could be overcome.
This Opinion article discusses the evidence for and the limitations of the three main models of inflammasome activation. The authors propose that the production of reactive oxygen species might be a common factor downstream of many types of inflammasome activator.
In this Opinion article, the authors suggest that more extensive use of laboratory measurements could help to expedite clinical trials of immunotherapy. They propose that surrogate end points could be used in place of clinical end points to determine drug safety, disease progression and therapeutic efficacy.
