0:00
Hello and welcome to
this talk on COVID-19:
the Anti-viral Immune Response.
I'm Danny Altmann.
I'm a professor of immunology
at Imperial College, London.
0:13
To start at the beginning.
For this talk, I'll
start quite basic
and build up to where we've
come to on the specifics
of the immune response
in the time of COVID.
If I date the dawn of
modern T cell and B cell
cellular immunology to
around 50 years ago,
since then immunologists
have learned
an enormous amount about
the nature of protective
immunity to some of the key
viruses that infect humans.
I guess we've accumulated
very large datasets
from studies looking at some of
the major pathogens
that have concerned us,
things like HIV, EBV,
CMV, flu, Hepatitis,
Dengue and even Zika.
But the coronavirus
family that we've
all become so obsessed with
in the last few years,
even including the common
cold coronaviruses
as well as SARS and MERS,
hadn't really been amongst the
most extensively
studied or understood.
But if you look at a little
graphic I've put here
of numbers of papers of content
published through 2019 to 2021,
you'll see that the
immunology of SARS-CoV-2,
the virus that causes COVID-19,
has become one of the
most massively studied
topics ever in human immunology.
1:32
Let's start at the
very beginning
and move on from there.
Obviously, when one learns
about protective immunity,
one tends to stratify it into
innate immunity and
adaptive immunity.
What do I mean by that?
Innate immunity refers to
intrinsic defence mechanisms
for recognising
microbial attack,
that something has
got into the body
from the environment
that shouldn't be there
and could be dangerous.
This includes everything from
the mucosal secretions
in the nasal pharynx,
but also white blood cells
such as neutrophils
and macrophages,
and the basic cellular responses
such as type 1 interferons.
These responses
are very rapid but
can be insufficient on their
own to prevent infection.
The key point is
they have no memory.
What do I mean by the
analogy of the word memory?
I mean that the
response will comprise
precisely the same features
and kinetics on the first,
second, or third encounter.
It doesn't get any
different or any better.
Also, the response isn't
particularly specific
to one virus
compared to another.
