How does our immune system identify between medicine or bacteria/viruses/infection/etc that gets into our body and decides the former can go through while the latter can’t? Do they ever misidentify?

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How does our immune system identify between medicine or bacteria/viruses/infection/etc that gets into our body and decides the former can go through while the latter can’t? Do they ever misidentify?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s no real distinction between helpful drug or dangerous pathogen as far as immunity is concerned. Things are foreign or they aren’t. What makes the difference is that most drugs are such simple, small molecules that they can’t be sensed at all by most mechanisms of the immune system, because those are tuned to look for things on the scale of proteins.

However, when you use large, especially protein-based drugs like monoclonal antibodies, these absolutely provoke immune responses if other steps aren’t taken to counteract that (for instance, modern monoclonals are engineered to differ as little as possible from unmodified human sequences).

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