The skin immune system

Abstract

The skin is the largest organ in the body. It serves many functions, including thermoregulation, endocrine homeostasis, and transduction of environmental stimuli. The latter can be from simple registering of heat and cold to photoreception [1] or to the complex haptic processing required to read Braille. The skin actively and passively defends against chemical, thermal, electrical, radioactive, physical, and other environmental and microbial insults. The latter defenses fall under the broad purview of the skin immune system. Nanotechnology exploits the unique properties of matter on the nanoscale to selectively target the skin immune system, either for the purposes of augmenting immunity, in the case of immunodeficiency or in generating an immune response against a tumor or pathogen, or for the purposes of selectively inhibiting the immune system, for example, to treat autoimmune disease or prevent the rejection of a grafted organ.