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Few studies have examined long-term outcomes following oral immunotherapy; none have examined long-term risks and benefits associated with distinct clinical outcomes (desensitization, remission).

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Oral immunotherapy is effective at inducing desensitisation to allergens and induces sustained unresponsiveness (ie, clinical remission) in a subset of patients, but causes frequent reactions. We aimed to investigate whether addition of a probiotic adjuvant improved the efficacy or safety of peanut oral immunotherapy.

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With immune checkpoint therapy (ICT) having reshaped the treatment of many cancers, the next frontier is to identify and develop novel combination therapies to improve efficacy. Previously, we and others identified beneficial immunological effects of the vitamin A derivative tretinoin on anti-tumour immunity.

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Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are common chronic respiratory diseases, and some patients have overlapping disease features, termed asthma-COPD overlap. Patients characterized with ACO have increased disease severity; however, the mechanisms driving this have not been widely studied.

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There is now considerable evidence demonstrating that both prenatal and postnatal exposure to particular classes of microbial stimuli can provide beneficial signals during early life immune development, resulting in the protection against future inflammatory disease.

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In addition to being a source of nutrients for the developing newborn, human milk contains thousands of bioactive compounds, which influence infant health in the short-term as exemplified by its major benefits on infectious disease prevention. Many of the human milk compounds also have the required characteristics to instruct immune development and guide long-term health.

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High risk for virus-induced asthma exacerbations in children is associated with an IRF7lo immunophenotype, but the underlying mechanisms are unclear. Here, we applied a Systems Biology approach to an animal model comprising rat strains manifesting high versus low susceptibility to experimental asthma, induced by virus/allergen coexposure, to elucidate the mechanism(s)-of-action of the high-risk asthma immunophenotype.

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Incomplete maturation of immune regulatory functions at birth is antecedent to the heightened risk for severe respiratory infections during infancy. Our forerunner animal model studies demonstrated that maternal treatment with the microbial-derived immune training agent OM-85 during pregnancy promotes accelerated postnatal maturation of mechanisms that regulate inflammatory processes in the offspring airways.

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Pat Deborah Holt Strickland PhD, DSc, FRCPath, FRCPI, FAA PhD Emeritus Honorary Researcher Head, Pregnancy and Early Life Immunology Patrick.Holt@

Research

Brown adipose tissue (BAT) may be an important metabolic regulator of whole-body glucose. While important roles have been ascribed to macrophages in regulating metabolic functions in BAT, little is known of the roles of other immune cells subsets, particularly dendritic cells (DCs). Eating a high-fat diet may compromise the development of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs)-which give rise to DCs-in bone marrow, with less known of its effects in BAT. We have previously demonstrated that ongoing exposure to low-dose ultraviolet radiation (UVR) significantly reduced the 'whitening' effect of eating a high-fat diet upon interscapular (i) BAT of mice.