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Blood, 17 September 2009, Vol. 114, No. 12, pp. 2367-2374. Prepublished online as a Blood First Edition Paper on July 7, 2009; DOI 10.1182/blood-2009-05-199208.
Submitted May 19, 2009
Vesalius Research Center, VIB-KULeuven, Leuven, Belgium * Corresponding author; email: emconway{at}interchange.ubc.ca.
The horseshoe crab is often referred to as a "living fossil", representative of the oldest classes of arthropods, almost identical to species in existence over 500 million years ago. Comparative analyses of the defense mechanisms utilized by the horseshoe crab that allowed it to survive mostly unchanged throughout the millenia, reveal a common ancestry of the coagulation and innate immune systems that are totally integrated - indeed, almost inseparable. In human biology, we traditionally view the hemostatic pathways and those regulating innate immune responses to infections and tissue damage as entirely separate entities. But are they? The last couple of decades has revealed a remarkable degree of interplay between these systems, and the linking cellular and molecular mechanisms are rapidly being delineated. In this review, we present some of the major points of intersection between coagulation and innate immunity. We attempt to highlight the potential impact of these findings by identifying recently established paradigms that will hopefully result in the emergence of new strategies to treat a range of inflammatory and hemostatic disorders.
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| Copyright © 2009 by American Society of Hematology Online ISSN: 1528-0020 | |||||||||
