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Helminth Immunity and Gut Homeostasis

34:49 recording · AUTO · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

The immune system's job is less to expel invaders than to protect organ function.

  1. Tolerance, not expulsion, defends against wormsKing argues the immune system limits the damage migrating helminths cause, borrowing wound-repair pathways instead of evolving ways to expel them.
  2. Age three in humans is three weeks in miceThe microbiome stabilizes by about age three; King models that malleable window at weaning in mice, which reach adulthood within six weeks.
  3. Parasite molecules could become a drug classWorms secrete proteins, sugars and lipids that reprogram immune cells, which King sees as a new category of therapeutics for other diseases.
Executive Summary AI
  • Cindy Leifer hosts an Immune office interview at Cornell with Ira King, a professor of microbiology and immunology at McGill University in Quebec, who came from a town of 800 in Western Pennsylvania, trained as a physical therapist at Pittsburgh, then took a PhD in neuroimmunology at Rochester and a postdoc in mucosal immunology.0:36
  • King explains that helminths are multicellular worms large enough to pick up with your hand, still among the most prevalent infections in the world because they secrete immunomodulatory factors, and that our immune system appears to tolerate and repair their damage using wound-healing pathways rather than expel them.4:37
  • His lab also studies the early-life window when the microbiome colonizes the gut: in humans it stabilizes around age three, which he models in mice at three weeks, when pups are weaned and become fully formed adults within six weeks.15:51
  • Longitudinal human studies and mouse work link early microbial composition and heavy antibiotic exposure in infancy to later allergy and autoimmune disease such as inflammatory bowel disease, though King argues the functional and metabolic output of the microbiota matters more than which specific species are present.20:08
  • Asked what excites him most, King says he is obsessed with how the immune system supports daily organ function beyond infection, advises trainees to challenge the dogma and follow the questions they love, and says commonly feeling stupid is what keeps him an everyday person.26:12
Key Quote
“I actually came from a very small town in Western Pennsylvania, population 800, no stoplights in the whole entire town.”
— Ira King1:51
Key Quote
“if you can't beat them, we must have figured out a way to join them.”
— Ira King6:26
Key Quote
“So this is really the million dollar question. How do we sense these parasites?”
— Ira King8:47