Turns Out Human Skin Has Its Own Immune System

When thinking about the human body, it’s easy to consider different organs and systems as having sole jurisdiction over certain processes and functions. Dig deeper into the inner workings of one’s anatomy, though, and you’ll find evidence that blurs those lines, such as the human gut having a kind of “second brain.” Look at it long enough, and you might start to think of humans as composite organisms like something out of a science fiction novel.

A new discovery about how our skin operates might further that line of thinking. We think of ourselves as having immune systems, but it turns out the skin has a dedicated one of its own. The authors of one of two papers recently published in Nature specifically cite “the remarkable ability of the skin to act as an autonomous lymphoid organ.”

As Nature's Giorgia Guglielmi explainsthese studies differ from earlier investigations into the immune properties of skin by focusing on skin that’s healthy. Previous case studies have explored how skin deals with infections; taken together with those earlier observations, scientists now have a better sense of what the skin is capable of and how these properties can help keep people healthier throughout their bodies.

Specifically, Guglielmi cites the potential of vaccines that could be applied without using needles. Or, as Michael Fischbach of Stanford University told Nature“The next and maybe main chapter in this saga is that the response to this ubiquitous skin colonist is much more potent than we had realized.”

Given that this year has also seen advancement when it comes to nasal vaccines, this latest development could give doctors a greater array of ways with which to prevent illnesses. Two years ago, the American Society for Microbiology argued that skin-based vaccines were a more efficient and effective way to inoculate people against various diseases; these new papers could represent a big step towards that goal.