
There’s something different about newborns’ blood. In babies less than 28 days of age, the immune system still hibernates—making newborns more susceptible to life-threatening infections and less responsive to many vaccines. Ofer Levy, MD, PhD, and his colleagues at Boston Children’s Hospital have done extensive work toward understanding the newborn immune system, and now they’ve uncovered a mechanism to help explain why the system is so weak—and how it might be strengthened.
“If we can understand the molecular mechanisms causing the immune system to be different when we’re very young or very old, we can leverage that knowledge to develop new treatments,” says Levy. …