The immune system deploys powerful "weapons" to fight invaders. However, an over-activated response, triggered by proteins like C5a, can cause these weapons to harm the body's own organs and tissues, similar to the collateral damage from a dirty bomb.

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Chronic low-grade inflammation often presents not as obvious swelling but as subtle, persistent symptoms. Issues like increased fatigue, difficulty concentrating, poor sleep, and skin problems can be driven by an under-the-radar inflammatory state that even doctors may miss.

Unlike external machines, implanting parts internally triggers the body's powerful defenses. The immune system attacks foreign objects, and blood forms clots around non-native surfaces. These two biological responses are the biggest design hurdles for internal replacement parts, problems that external devices like dialysis machines don't face.

InflaRx's strategy targets the C5a pathway, implicated in many inflammatory conditions. By focusing on this single mechanism, their drug could potentially treat a wide range of diseases, from skin conditions to kidney disease, effectively creating a valuable "pipeline in a drug."

To overcome on-target, off-tumor toxicity, LabGenius designs antibodies that act like biological computers. These molecules "sample" the density of target receptors on a cell's surface and are engineered to activate and kill only when a specific threshold is met, distinguishing high-expression cancer cells from low-expression healthy cells.

The rise in consumer cleaning products and spick-and-span households reduces our exposure to diverse microbes. According to the hygiene hypothesis, this lack of immune system training can make our bodies less robust and more prone to overreacting to benign substances like food proteins, thus fostering allergies.

Sepsis is not a monolithic condition. The failure of more than 100 immunomodulatory drug trials is likely because they treated all patients the same. The future of sepsis treatment mirrors oncology: subtyping patients based on their specific inflammatory profile to match them with a targeted therapy.

Cytokines, the molecules of inflammation, are essentially distress signals from cells that are struggling energetically. For example, the cytokine IL-6 released after intense exercise is the muscle's way of signaling it needs energy mobilized from other parts of the body.

Modern critical care for sepsis only treats the consequences of the disease—organ failure, low blood pressure—with supportive measures like ventilators and IV fluids. There are zero approved therapies that actually treat the underlying root cause: the out-of-control immune response that is actively damaging the patient's body.

The modern definition of sepsis is not "blood poisoning" but a dysregulated host response. The immune system's inflammatory reaction spirals out of control, causing organ damage long after the initial infection is gone. In fact, fewer than half of sepsis patients have a detectable infection in their bloodstream.

Bi-specific T-cell engagers (BiTEs) are highly immunogenic because the mechanism activating T-cells to kill cancer also primes them to mount an immune response against the drug itself. This 'collateral effect' is an inherent design challenge for this drug class.