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Updated: Jul 5, 2025
A Neonatal Imaging Model of Gram-Negative Bacterial Sepsis
Published on: August 12, 2020
Life-threatening infections in human newborns: Reconciling age-specific vulnerability and interindividual variability
1Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, San Matteo Research Hospital, Pavia, EU, Italy; School of Life Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Insights
Newborns face varied infection risks due to immune responses. Understanding these differences can help prevent severe illness and develop new treatments for infant infections.
Area of Science:
- Immunology
- Neonatal Medicine
- Infectious Diseases
Background:
- Interindividual variability in clinical outcomes after microbial exposure is vast, from silent infections to life-threatening diseases.
- Age-specific immune responses contribute to high infection rates and mortality in the first 28 days of life, but individual severe cases in newborns remain unexplained.
- Inborn errors of immunity are increasingly identified in children and adults with severe infections.
Purpose of the Study:
- To bridge neonatal immunology and clinical immunology.
- To identify mechanisms of infection susceptibility in individual newborns.
- To design novel preventive and therapeutic strategies for neonatal infections.
Main Methods:
- Population-wide characterization of newborn-specific immune responses.
- Cellular and molecular investigations of infections in patients.
- Comparative analysis of neonatal and clinical immunology data.
Main Results:
- Neonatal immune responses exhibit significant variability.
- Specific genetic or acquired immune defects can lead to severe infections in newborns.
- Convergence of data is crucial for understanding susceptibility.
Conclusions:
- A unified approach combining neonatal and clinical immunology is needed.
- Identifying individual susceptibility mechanisms can guide targeted interventions.
- Novel strategies for preventing and treating infections in newborns can be developed.
Abstract:
In humans, the interindividual variability of clinical outcome following exposure to a microorganism is immense, ranging from silent infection to life-threatening disease. Age-specific immune responses partially account for the high incidence of infection during the first 28 days of life and the related high mortality at population level. However, the occurrence of life-threatening disease in individual newborns remains unexplained. By contrast, inborn errors of immunity and their immune phenocopies are increasingly being discovered in children and adults with life-threatening viral, bacterial, mycobacterial and fungal infections. There is a need for convergence between the fields of neonatal immunology, with its in-depth population-wide characterization of newborn-specific immune responses, and clinical immunology, with its investigations of infections in patients at the cellular and molecular levels, to facilitate identification of the mechanisms of susceptibility to infection in individual newborns and the design of novel preventive and therapeutic strategies.
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