Honoring a leader in innate immunity
On June 5 in Germany, School of Medicine researcher Ruslan M. Medzhitov received the inaugural Else Kröner Fresenius Award, an international prize for distinguished immunology research created in 2012 by the Else Kröner–Fresenius Foundation (EKFF), one of Germany’s largest philanthropic organizations. The award recognizes Medzhitov’s pioneering contributions to our understanding of the innate immune system, which mounts an immediate defense against infection and provides the slower-acting adaptive immune system with the necessary information to create custom-made cells that target specific bacterial or viral invaders. Medzhitov, the David W. Wallace Professor of Immunobiology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, has done seminal studies elucidating the critical role of innate immune system molecules known as toll-like receptors (TLRs) in sensing microbial infections, as well as how TLR signaling activates inflammation and adaptive immunity.
Typhoid toxin’s deadly design
Typhoid fever, one of the longest-known diseases in human history, still claims more than 200,000 lives a year globally. But the molecular factors that make Salmonella typhi far more virulent than the closely related Salmonella bacteria that cause the temporary abdominal distress associated with food poisoning have been a mystery. A Yale study has now revealed how S. typhi packs its lethal punch, a discovery that could lead to the development of effective vaccines and other new therapies against typhoid fever. Nearly a decade ago, a research team led by Jorge Galán, chair and Lucille P. Markey Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis, identified a toxin unique to S. typhi. In follow-up work published in the July 11 issue of Nature, Galán and colleagues report that delivering the toxin alone to mice produced the main symptoms of typhoid fever. The team also solved the atomic structure of the toxin and identified the cellular receptors that guide the toxin to its site of action.
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