The Pig as a Translational Model for Respiratory Immunology Research-Juniper publishers
JUNIPER PUBLISHERS-OPEN ACCESS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PULMONARY & RESPIRATORY SCIENCES
Opinion
Respiratory diseases in the world had increased
dramatically in recent years. Cancer, COPD, allergies and a wide
spectrum of re-emergent infectious diseases have challenged the
capabilities of institutional health services, not only in developing
countries but also in first world nations. The periodical release of
sanitary alerts from the WHO should drive attention to the increased
need of practical and effective solutions to those problems.
And it is in that sense that immunologist should
recognize the lack of knowledge on how the immune system in the lung
deals with many of these maladies. As a consequence, therapeutics and
prophylaxis are, in many cases, just palliative measures which do not
control or eliminate the problem.
Research in mucosal immunology is relatively recent,
compared with traditional systemic knowledge. This should not represent
major problem if the mucosal immune system follows the same pathways
systemic immunity does. Unfortunately this is not always the case.
Vaccination is a good example of this. Systemic (mainly intramuscular)
vaccination has demonstrated to be very effective in inducing humoral
and even cellular immune responses. The injection of the antigen into a
highly vascularized tissue guarantees its arrival to the lymphoid
organs, which will develop the whole array of immune responses in a
short period. Problems as tolerance induction, uncertain administered
dose and premature degradation of the antigen (Ag) are minimized.
Mucosal immunization, on the contrary, deals with the tendency to induce
tolerance to Ags and it is almost impossible to guarantee that the
administered dose reach the immune organs due to different rates of Ag
degradation.
Another problem to overcome is the limited access to
mucosal human samples where to perform experiments on structure,
development, function and regulation. Rodents have been successfully
used to reveal some of the particular features mucosal immunology have
compared to systemic immunity. The presence of inductive and effector
sites is one of the features which differentiate mucosal from systemic
immunity. However,questions as structure and development of the
respiratory immune system are difficult to address in rodents. Important
differences in size, incomplete development at birth and the
constitutive expression of nasal and bronchial lymphoid tissues
difficult the extrapolation of results to human beings. Fortunately
enough, other animal models have been developed with particular success.
One of them, the pig, is considered a suitable model for human
infectious and degenerative diseases [1,2], medical training [3] and
respiratory medicine [4]. We have used the pig to elucidate some basic
questions as the development of lung immune cells after birth [5], the
appearance and function of the lung IgA secretory system [6] and the
role of maternal immunity on the respiratory immune response to early
mucosal vaccination [7]. The information obtained from these reports
allowed us to understand more closely the reasons behind the increased
susceptibility of young organisms to respiratory diseases, to identify
critical stages in mucosal development where vaccination may be needed
and the role of maternal immunity to compensate the transient poor
immunological performance of the young animal in both systemic and
mucosal compartments.
Issues as the effective development of humoral and
cellular immune responses at mucosal sites after vaccination, the
understanding of how respiratory allergies develop in the respiratory
system, the search for early induction of immunity in the young and the
modulation of the tolerance/immunity dichotomy at mucosal sites, are now
intensively investigated, using models at pre-clinical studies. The
results of these intriguing questions will be surely boosted by the use
of translational models as the pig.
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