Excerpt from: The Washington Post (click for full article)
Scientists now hope to study the immunology of bats to try to uncover findings that can assist the development of treatments for AIDS.
Meteyer said she envisions a day when “we can look closely at the mechanism driving this intense response in bats and potentially get insight into this phenomenon in humans.”
Her co-author, Judith Mandl, a research fellow for the National Institutes of Health involved in AIDS research, was also intrigued by the similarities between bat and human reactions. “When you release immune suppression, you get a response that’s a lot more damaging than helpful,” she said. The third co-author is Daniel Barber, who also works at NIH.
“You have a system set up for catastrophe,” Meteyer said, a mad army of white blood cells massed for a lethal attack. What triggers it? “They have no idea how to recognize a fungus without a chemical signal. What is the signal?”
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