Cool new study which found that a range of #pathogens (some capable of long-term persistence in tissue + #blood) upregulate expression of the cell surface protein CD47 in the host cells they infect as an #immune evasion strategy
2/ I fact, upregulation of CD47 is a very smart survival strategy by such pathogens, b/c it interferes w/ the host innate immune response that is normally supposed to identify, target and kill them!
4/ Implications of the findings are that an #immunotherapy cld be developed that cld block CD47 from being upregulated by the #pathogens, allowing the immune system to regain its more robust ability to target/clear the #infected cells
5/ Interestingly, a CD47 immunotherapy is already in development for #cancer cells (which often upregulate CD47 as an immune evasion tactic).
6/ What that says to me personally is that #cancer cells expreasing CD47 are likely infected (consider all the viral/bacterial pathogens recent studies have found in tumors!nature.com/articles/s4158…, science.sciencemag.org/content/368/64…) HCV, which upregulates CD47 is a known oncogenic virus. 
7/ But back to the first study, a key takeaway is upregulation of CD47 was shown to be a common survival mechnism employed by different #viral + #bacterial pathogens (mouse retroviruses, lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus, SARS CoV-2, #Borrelia burgdorferi etc)
9/ That trend is really important in conditions like #ME/CFS, where patients sustain different #infections, but many of the pathogens they acquire can do similar things to host function (eg: different pathogens can infect #mitochondria or #collagen in very similar ways)
10/ What that means is that in conditions like ME/CFS, we don’t have to find THE pathogen for the disease process to center on #infection. All we need are different pathogens that infect the same #tissue, #nerve etc, or that disregulate the immune reponse via similar mechanisms
