0:00
Hello, my name is
Paul Klenerman.
I'm a Truelove Professor at
the Nuffield
Department of Medicine
at the University of Oxford,
and I've got a talk on
immune mechanisms
in liver diseases.
0:15
In this talk, I am
going to discuss
first some basic concepts about
liver immunology and
tolerance and why
the liver immune system
is a little bit special.
Then I will talk about some
of the specific components
of the liver immune system.
Then I'm going to talk about
immune mediated pathology,
in particular, viral hepatitis,
focusing on one particular
type hepatitis B,
and mention along the way other
immune mediated pathologies.
0:42
The liver is a
very unusual organ
from a lot of perspectives,
but particularly from
an immunological one.
One really good
example of this is
that Roy Calne in
the 1960s started
to do transplantation
experiments in pigs.
He found that he
could transplant
livers across
transplantation barriers,
for example, the
kidney can only be
transplanted between
animals that share MHC.
Sharing an MHC is essentially
the key barrier that
needs to be overcome
to have successful
transplantation
of a kidney, or a
lung, or a heart.
For a liver, none of this
makes any difference.
You don't need to
have any sharing
of MHC and it's well tolerated.
The other feature of this is
that the pigs can also
tolerate other organs
once they've had a liver.
This was all set out
in some very nice
papers by Roy Calne,
including this one,
Strange English PIGS,
that were published
in the 1960s.
