The effect of drugs on immunological control mechanisms
J.L. Turk, Darien Parker · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 1979
The concept that an immune response is under specific homoeostatic control has been one that has crystallised over the last decade. As a result of increasing dissatisfaction with currently held hypotheses, much recent knowledge has developed from a reassessment of the mechanisms of immunological unresponsiveness. Clarification of the status of certain immunological phenomena that did not conform to current dogma has added to a new understanding of the immune response. This approach has been simplified by the identification of different populations of lymphocytes capable of interaction at various levels in the immune response. The immune response, whether cell-mediated or due to antibody, has in the past been considered as a positive unidirectional force in which the effector mechanism showed a narrow specificity for antigen. Immunological unresponsiveness was considered to be a negative phenomenon as exemplified by terms such as ‘tolerance’ and ‘clone elimination’. The concept that immunological unresponsiveness could be a positive phenomenon developed from the study of ‘immunological enhancement’ in which the unresponsive state could be transferred by serum and was shown to be dependent on antibody. These studies were the first to indicate a modulatory effect of one form of the immune response on another; in this case of humoral antibody on a cell-mediated immune response.