3 ms·

If it's a training set problem, wouldn't it be possible to give a "vaccine" consisting of a reasonable mix of antigens from time to time? Has this been tried?

djd20 5y ago
That's how many vaccines work... dead versions of pathogens.
epgui 5y ago
It's not completely inconceivable that we will one day have therapeutic approaches in that line of reasoning, but it's also not quite that simple. There is a critical period during infancy and early childhood when the immune system goes through a number of critical maturation processes. Afaik, once that's done there's no going back to a perfectly fresh slate. After puberty, for example, your thymus (an important site for T cell maturation) begins shrinking and eventually all that remains of the organ is basically non-functional traces of scar tissue. That is not to say that T cell maturation doesn't occur afterwards, but it is a particularly striking example of the irreversible age-related change we can be talking about. Another less-obvious example is that children born by cesarian have a different skin and gut flora through the rest of their lives than children who are born through the vaginal canal: the initial colonization of the skin with a different set of bacteria has some degree of permanence, though it is also somewhat plastic. Yet another example, children who are breastfed tend to have fewer food allergies or auto-immune diseases (atopy, generally) than children who are fed formula. Early conferral of passive immunity through maternal antibodies secreted in breast milk selects for different populations of gut microbes, and again there is some degree of permanence to this. In both cases, the differences are measurable throughout adulthood!
- killjoywashere 5y ago
  Everything epgui said above. Just to add another line of argument: thanks to sequencing, we also know there are a lot of germs that we simply can't culture. We used to suspect that, but now we know that. Most general hygiene methods are non-discriminitive, so as cleanliness goes up, opportune exposures to rare edge cases go down, and probably go down fast. We are becoming, in a sense, a species of oligoculture hosts.
wpasc 5y ago
There's people who engage in Helminth therapy (purposefully getting parasitic infections like a hookworm) for purposes of inflammatory disorders. I don't know much about it but enough people take it seriously

djd20 5y ago

That's how many vaccines work... dead versions of pathogens.

epgui 5y ago

It's not completely inconceivable that we will one day have therapeutic approaches in that line of reasoning, but it's also not quite that simple. There is a critical period during infancy and early childhood when the immune system goes through a number of critical maturation processes. Afaik, once that's done there's no going back to a perfectly fresh slate. After puberty, for example, your thymus (an important site for T cell maturation) begins shrinking and eventually all that remains of the organ is basically non-functional traces of scar tissue. That is not to say that T cell maturation doesn't occur afterwards, but it is a particularly striking example of the irreversible age-related change we can be talking about. Another less-obvious example is that children born by cesarian have a different skin and gut flora through the rest of their lives than children who are born through the vaginal canal: the initial colonization of the skin with a different set of bacteria has some degree of permanence, though it is also somewhat plastic. Yet another example, children who are breastfed tend to have fewer food allergies or auto-immune diseases (atopy, generally) than children who are fed formula. Early conferral of passive immunity through maternal antibodies secreted in breast milk selects for different populations of gut microbes, and again there is some degree of permanence to this. In both cases, the differences are measurable throughout adulthood!

killjoywashere 5y ago
Everything epgui said above. Just to add another line of argument: thanks to sequencing, we also know there are a lot of germs that we simply can't culture. We used to suspect that, but now we know that. Most general hygiene methods are non-discriminitive, so as cleanliness goes up, opportune exposures to rare edge cases go down, and probably go down fast. We are becoming, in a sense, a species of oligoculture hosts.

wpasc 5y ago

There's people who engage in Helminth therapy (purposefully getting parasitic infections like a hookworm) for purposes of inflammatory disorders. I don't know much about it but enough people take it seriously