By Dhiren Patel
Edited by Chloe Pyle and Faith Uwadiae
In the recent ‘Compare & Contrast’ journal club, we had the pleasure of discussing two excellent papers based on the immunopathological roles of Toll-like Receptor 4 (TLR4). The two papers presented the importance of the localisation of TLR4 on stromal or haematopoietic cell types and their contribution in inducing pathology in different airway disease models.
Toll-like receptor 4, is a pattern-recognition receptor that is expressed on array of cells and a common agonist for this receptor is Lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a sugar molecule highly expressed on gram negative bacterial cells1. The importance of TLR4 expression on immune cells such as granulocytes, neutrophils and eosinophils in driving an immune response against various pathogens has been published on extensively.