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Gut Microbiota and Immune Defense

1:22:47 recording · AUTO · 6 speakers

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Brief overview

Two immunologists show how microbes at our barriers tune tissue immunity, repair and disease.

  1. Barrier microbes are constant immune partnersSkin and gut commensals keep immunity switched on in health, not just during infection.
  2. Immune signals rewire tissue metabolismIL-17 drives HIF-1-alpha and glycolysis in epithelial stem cells so wounds can rebuild fast.
  3. State funding is an untapped leverNew York Cures asks the governor for an Empire Biomedical Institute out of a $250 billion budget.
Executive Summary AI
  • Immune episode 100, recorded 22 December 2025 before a live audience at the Incubator, eight years after the show began in November 2017, brings Vincent and co-hosts Cindy Leifer, Steph Langell and Brianne Barker together with guests Gretchen Diehl of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Shruti Naik of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.0:09
  • Diehl, who works on how intestinal microbes shape immunity, explains her paper Thymic Development of Gut Microbiota-Specific T Cells: antigen-presenting cells carry gut microbial antigens all the way to the thymus, expanding microbiota-specific T cells in early life while later life deletes them or turns them regulatory.17:50
  • Naik recounts that a gut microbe such as SFB can restore immune responses in germ-free mice in the gut but not in the skin, and a skin microbe the reverse, proving skin and gut are distinctly regulated compartments.45:35
  • Her lab found IL-17 does more than inflame: it turns on HIF-1-alpha in wound-edge epithelial stem cells, switching them to glycolysis so they adapt to low oxygen and make new tissue, with the lactate byproduct then fuelling the immune cells beside them.49:34
  • Naik closes on advocacy: colleagues across New York's 14 medical schools proposed an Empire Biomedical Institute to Governor Kathy Hochul, arguing a state with a $250 billion budget should fund science, and launched New York Cures as a constituency at www.nycures.com.1:13:12
Key Quote
“It's on all the time in all of us.”
— Shruti Naik12:43
Key Quote
“And so it makes sense that they talk to each other.”
— Gretchen Diehl19:35
Key Quote
“Every hypothesis I've ever had has been wrong.”
— Shruti Naik44:23