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

2008年，结核病（TB）导致180万人死亡。然而，大多数感染结核病细菌的人从未感到不适。相反，它们身体的防御细胞与生物体相互作用，使其在人体内处于休眠状态。这就是所谓的潜伏感染。在这些人中的一部分人中，细菌后来醒来并导致人变得不适。我们还不知道大多数人的身体如何能够保持感染休眠，特别是在大多数疾病发生的肺部。了解这一过程将有助于开发更好的治疗方法，以帮助那些身体无法控制细菌的人，结核病是一种严重的，往往是致命的疾病。我们建议首先证明潜伏感染不是一种疾病，而是一系列疾病;为了做到这一点，我们计划使用专家扫描和肺部采样的新技术。然后，我们将研究血液和肺中的特定防御细胞，以了解身体如何控制不同类型潜伏感染的结核病，无论是在感染过程的早期，还是在已确诊的疾病中。

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.