Legends Of Allergy/Immunology: Polly Matzinger

Polly Matzinger's work has mainly been focused on two fundamental questions in immunology and therefore also relevant to allergy. First, how does the immune system know whether to react or not against a given molecule. Second, if it reacts, how does it determine the type of immune response it will choose (e.g. IgG , IgG , IgE, IgA, Th1, 2, 3; CTL, etc). Polly is both a theoretician who challenges existing dogma to shape future discoveries and an experimentalist who succeeded in deepening our understanding of how the immune system "works."