Researchers from New Jersey Medical School at Rutgers Health received a multi-million-dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how previous infections help or hinder the body’s subsequent response to unrelated pathogens that cause lung disease. The five-year grant will support the work of immunologists William C. Gause, Amariliz Rivera and Mark Siracusa, who will examine how mice fight lung infection after exposure to various parasites, fungi and viruses.
“There’s this huge unexplained variation in how sick people get after exposure to various lung pathogens,” said Gause, director of the Rutgers Health Institute for Infectious and Inflammatory Diseases. “The same exposure that produces no symptoms in some people might prove fatal to a different set of seemingly similar people. We believe that one important factor may be previous exposure not to the same pathogen but to different ones.” To read the full story.