[johncearls]

Yeah. I did a lot of work with blood measures and every disease had some characteristic spike in n immune function. I worked in a lab with a ton of immunologists and we never knew what was going on. All we could say was activation of complement or strong TNF response or something else descriptive but not really helpful. Just too much dark matter in the immune system. My big hope is that the silver lining of COVID will be a much deeper understanding of the immune system. Certainly a ton of money is being poured into it. Fingers crossed, we could be entering a golden age for immuno-therapeutics.

[wpasc]

Here here to the possibility of starting a golden age of immune related research and investment. IMO (as an autoimmune patient who reads a bunch about my disease/immune system and has done some computation biology work during my CS masters, but otherwise unqualified), immune system research is severely underfunded in relation to how involved it is in virtually ever bodily function.

I kinda feel like with other organs that are tangible and you can like see and feel (brain, kidney, heart, etc) are much more obvious choices to study and examine for pathology (ie plaque in the arteries, kidney stone). But an ephemeral system of on/off switches that communicate with each other to attack or not attack stuff? kinda makes sense that it is elusive and poorly understood.

my great hope is we are starting to enter a golden age of immuno-therapies, and it's not just because of COVID. Immunotherapy is genuinely the most exciting area of cancer therapies right now (again, IMO). between CAR-T cell therapies, proposed NK cell therapies, PD-1 inhibitors, etc, whats not to be excited about?