The role of innate and adaptive pulmonary immune responses in shaping the spectrum of Latent Tuberculosis Infection

2008年，结核病导致180万人死亡。然而，大多数感染了导致结核病的细菌的人永远不会生病。相反，他们身体的防御细胞与有机体相互作用，使其在人体内休眠。这被称为潜伏感染。在这些人中，有一部分人的细菌稍后会醒来，并导致患者身体不适。我们还不知道大多数人的身体是如何使感染保持休眠状态的，特别是在大多数疾病发生的肺部。了解这一过程将允许为身体无法控制细菌和结核病是一种严重且往往致命的疾病的其他人开发更好的治疗方法。我们建议通过首先证明潜伏感染不是一种情况，而是一系列疾病；为此，我们计划使用专业扫描和新的肺部采样技术。然后，我们将观察血液和肺部的特定防御细胞，看看身体如何控制那些患有不同类型潜伏感染的人的结核病，无论是在感染过程的早期，还是在已确定的疾病中。

In 2008 tuberculosis (TB) killed 1.8 million people. However, most people who are infected with the bacteria causing tuberculosis never become unwell. Instead, their body‘s defence cells interact with the organism so that it becomes dormant within the human body. This is called LATENT INFECTION. In a proportion of these people the bacteria later wakes up and causes the person to become unwell. We don‘t yet understand how in most people the body is able to keep the infection dormant, especially in the lung where most illness occurs. Understanding this process will allow better treatments to be developed for those other people where the body is unable to control the bacteria and TB is a serious and often fatal disease.We propose to do this by firstly demonstrating that latent infection not one condition, but a spectrum of illness; to do this, we plan to use specialist scans and new techniques of sampling the lung. We will then look at specific defence cells from the blood and lungs to see how the body controls TB in those with different types of latent infection, both early in the course of infection, and in established disease.