Clinical immunology

The primary purposes of this book are first, to introduce the reader to the fundamental components of the immune system and the basic concepts involved in understanding how those components interact to achieve host defense, and second to highlight how that understanding proves invaluable to diagnosis and treatment of a wide variety of clinical disorders. In the introductory chapters attention is focused on the cells and factors which make up both the innate and acquired immune systems. While the innate system is often thought of as the "primitive" immune system, we will see that it is in many ways no less complex and wide- ranging, in its action than the acquired (adaptive) system. The acquired immune system is, itself, composed of a unique collection of specialized cells (lymphocytes) which have the remarkable capacity to undergo genomic DNA rearrange¬ments to generate populations with a seemingly infinite capacity to recognize foreign (non-self) molecular determinants. As might be expected, development of such diversity necessarily brings with it the concomitant need to ensure that the self is still recognized as such (and thus protected from whatever host defense mechanisms are brought to bear upon "foreign", non-self, material (or organisms). Understanding how self:nonself discrimination occurs naturally, how and why it sometimes fails, and how it may be controlled exogenously, remain some of the key problems in contemporary immunology and clinical immunology