Description:

Title: Microbial Tools to Characterize Age-Associated Innate Immune Dysfunction

Speaker: John Leong, PhD / Tufts University

Host: Alan Hauser, MD, PhD

Topic:

Aging is associated with increased susceptibility to infection, and comparison of immune effectors of young and aged individuals has identified many functions that become compromised in the elderly. Less understood are which immune functions, when altered with aging, specifically contribute to an inability to resist disease. We have utilized Streptococcus pneumoniae, a pathogen that differentially causes serious illness in the elderly, to probe age-associated innate immune dysfunction that leads to the susceptibility of the aged individual to invasive disease by S. pneumoniae.