Adapting the crocodile’s immune system
Imagine you’re a crocodile, living in a swamp somewhere. You regularly fight with your neighbors; encounters which regularly leave you with large gashes and open wounds. You might even lose a limb. Now consider the water in which you live, and how dirty and bacteria-infested it is. But somehow, you never get an infection, despite the nasty bacteria being applied directly to open wounds.
Scientists hope to use parts of the crocodile immune system in humans, but the problem is adapting it in such a way where it doesn’t harm the host. The basic principle underlying the immune system is self/non-self recognition and destruction. For instance, during allergy season, your immune system is overzealous about attacking allergens, causing you to be miserable. Well, researchers would like to take pieces of the croc’s immune system and make oral tablets and antibiotic ointments that could be rubbed on wounds, while being careful that the croc’s immune system doesn’t harm the body. The problem with this is that the body’s immune system might see the croc’s immune system as a foreign invader, and attack it.
Nonetheless the croc’s immune system shows a lot of promise in many different areas: fighting HIV and I would even venture to say antibiotic-resistent bacteria as well.
Adam Britton, a member of the team, said: “If you take a test tube of HIV and add crocodile serum, it has a greater effect than human serum. It kills a greater number of HIV viral organisms.”
He continued: “The crocodile has an immune system which attaches to bacteria, making it explode. It’s like putting a gun to the head of the bacteria and pulling the trigger.”
The reptile’s immune system resists fatal infections despite savage fights with other crocodiles that result in missing limbs.
“Even though they live in an environment with all these microbes, they heal very rapidly and almost always without infection,” said Mark Merchant, a United States scientist working on the project.
It should be noted that the crocodile’s immune system is not “more powerful” than a human’s immune system. Instead, it is different — more suited to the environment in which the crocodile lives, which happens to be infested with bugs that the human immune system is not equipped to fight, but which occasionally make their way to humanity.
(It should be also be noted that the first sentence of the article reads thus: “CROCODILE blood may be the key to creating powerful antibiotics that fight HIV, scientists in Australia claim.” The truth of the matter is that antibiotics don’t fight HIV, they fight bacteria. Anti-retrovirals fight HIV.)
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