TASMANIAN DEVIL IMMUNITY

Tasmanian devils possess a wide range of active cellular immune responses and their ability to respond to anti­gens, as well as reject skin allografts, is documented (Kreiss et al. 2008; Brown et al. 2011). It was thought that the low variability in MHC classes I and II within Tasma­nian devils, and indeed DFT1 (Belov 2011), was the pri­mary reason DFT1 could evade normal immune responses; however, it is the cancer’s ability to reduce the expression of MHC that is the mechanism of immune avoidance (Morris and Belov 2013).

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