• Question: What is the difference between a humoral specific immune response and cellular specific immune response?

    Asked by Nico ;-) to Sian, Ben on 9 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Ben Mulhearn

      Ben Mulhearn answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      Ha! This looks like it’s been taken straight from a text book!! ‘Humor’ is a really old word from Greek meaning ‘of the fluid’, so humoral basically means dissolved in the blood. Antibodies (made by B cells) are proteins in solution in the blood, therefore the humoral response refers to antibodies. The cellular response means that cells are involved in attacking bacteria and viruses which have already infected our own cells. Imagine a virus gets inside one of your cells, this means that the antibodies won’t be able to get to them, but the infected cell can now ‘look’ differently on the outside, and our T cells can detect this are some of them are able to kill the infected cells.
      In summary:
      Humoral response – B cells – antibodies – extracellular microbes
      Cellular response – T cells – direct cell-to-cell contact – intracellular microbes

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