Anatomical and cellular basis of immunity and tolerance in the intestine?

MOWAT A; MILLINGTON OR; CHIRDO FG

JOURNAL OF PEDIATRIC GASTROENTEROLOGY AND NUTRITION

Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Lugar: Philadelphia; Año: 2004 vol. 39 p. 723 - 724

0277-2116

The intestine encounters more antigen than any other part of the body and so contains the largest proportion of the immune system. This sophisticated immune apparatus is necessary to generate strong protective immunity against pathogenic infections, but much of the intestinal antigen load consists of harmless materials such as food proteins and commensal bacteria. It would be wasteful to direct active immune responses against these antigens and in fact, such responses cause intestinal disorders such as coeliac disease and Crohn?s disease (1). For these reasons, the default response to harmless antigens in the gut is the induction of immunologic hyporesponsiveness. In addition to its physiological role, this phenomenon of oral tolerance can be exploited to deliver immunotherapy against autoimmune and inflammatory diseases (1,2) and it is also an important obstacle to the development of oral vaccines.