Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty. And the pig likes it.
In December last year, a new research paper revealed how a protein called perforin – the ‘bullet’ of the immune system – kills rogue cells in our body.
How these immune pore-forming proteins function has been a key question since the discovery of “haemolytic complement proteins” in the 1890s by the Nobel laureate Jules Bordet. Bordet was the first to notice that the human immune system was capable of punching holes in target cells.
But as Professor Joe Trapani, head of the Cancer Immunology Program at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and one of the authors of the paper, says, “Until now, perforin has been a real black box. No-one has really known how it all fits together to form a pore”.
painting { Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, 1902 }
