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At least one of their former AMs is hoping to become a Reform MS - Caroline Jones.

They live in the lung's alveoli, the tiny air sacs where oxygen passes into the bloodstream -- but, as Rothchild has shown in a previous paper, AMs don't mount a robust immune response when they're initially infected by Mtb.

"What if the AMs responded more effectively to Mtb? How could we change the body's innate immune response? Studies over the last 10 years or so have demonstrated that the innate immune system is capable of undergoing long-term changes, but we are only beginning to understand the underlying mechanisms behind them."

While both sets of AMs showed a stronger pro-inflammatory response to Mtb than AMs from unexposed mice, the BCG-vaccinated AMs strongly turned on one type of inflammatory program, driven by interferons, while the AMs from the contained Mtb infection turned on a qualitatively different inflammatory program.

Other experiments showed that the different exposure scenarios changed the AMs themselves, and that some of these changes seem to be dependent on the greater lung environment.