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Skin in the game — locally made antibodies fight resident bacteria

How immune responses arise against microorganisms living on the skin is not fully understood. The discovery that skin maintains its own system to form antibody responses reveals an unexpected vaccination route.
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  1. Jeong-Mi Lee

    1. Jeong-Mi Lee is in the Transplantation Research Center, Division of Renal Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.

  2. Peter T. Sage

    1. Peter T. Sage is in the Transplantation Research Center, Division of Renal Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.

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The immune system maintains a delicate balance in the skin between tolerating some microorganisms that normally dwell there (commensals) and targeting disease-causing agents for removal. Yet our understanding of factors that control this balance is incomplete. It is evident that skin-associated immune-system sites called lymphoid structures support T cells of the immune system that respond to individual microorganisms (a branch of the defence response known as adaptive immunity)1. But the extent to which skin-specific sites exist as niches for antibody production by B cells of the immune system is unclear. Writing in Nature, Gribonika et al.2 and Bousbaine et al.3 advance our understanding of skin commensal immunity by revealing that non-inflammatory commensal bacteria, such as Staphylococcus epidermidis, can induce potent and specific antibody responses in the skin. These studies reveal the body’s natural ability to control commensal bacteria in non-inflammatory settings. They might also lead the way to the development of new therapeutic strategies for vaccination approaches (Fig. 1a).

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Nature 638, 894-896 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-04205-4

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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