EAHAO #24 - "Can an immune system have MEMORY??" with Dr. Alan Young

Every mammal's immune system works in basically the same way.  And of course, that includes COWS.

Dr. Young is a distinguished leader in immunology and vaccine production as well as a university professor.  

In his easy-to-understand approach to explaining science, Dr. Young explains how a mammal's immune system creates a kind of 'memory' to give vaccines opportunity to help fight disease more effectively.

This podcast is a solid listen for producers and veterinarians... and even those who lost the notes from high school biology! ;)

#vaccines #immunesystem #cattle #cattleranch #animalhealth #veterinarian

Posted March 10, 2026 - 05:55 minutes

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to Every Animal Has an Owner, a mostly large animal podcast for veterinarians and the people that depend on them.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

I'm Alan Young. I'm a comparative immunologist by training. Um I received my degree in in Canada and have been quite a few places, but now I serve as the chief technology officer for MedGene Labs. Everybody's immune system works the same way for higher organisms. Your immune system basically at its heart recognizes the difference between what we call self and non-self. What is supposed to be there and what isn't. And then it tries to restore you to the starting position of just self and nothing that's non-self. Cow's immune system does the same thing. If a cow gets infected, just like a human does, it mounts an immune response. That immune response is balanced and it has what we call the innate immune system that has a program that helps to raise your body temperature, to wall off areas of damage, to recruit other components in to help with it, as well as the acquired immune system, which is what we focus on with vaccination, which is to bring components such as antibody producing cells, and we'll probably talk about those a bit, as well as regulatory cells that come in and basically try to clear that infection away from the animal or the body. Now there are a few interesting differences between cows and humans, but in terms of the actual response, that's pretty much conserved between all species. The acquired immune system is there that is different than the innate immune system. It is there to respond specifically to foreign things that come in and interfere with your normal body function or the cow's normal body function. And it has certain characteristics that are different than the innate immune system, and the primary one is something we call immunological memory. So when you get infected with something, when you are exposed to something, your immune system mounts this response. We call this a primary response. And that response generates antibodies, it generates those cells I talked about to eventually clear off the infection. And a prime standard primary response to really get rolling takes a couple of weeks on average. However, you are then protected against further infection because you now have what's called immunological memory present. And that memory says, I saw that particular influenza virus last year. And so now if that virus comes in, it doesn't take that two weeks, there's no lag time, you already have antibodies present to clear it away, you already have the cellular components there to respond, and it's much more rapid, much stronger, and it's highly specific. So it's good for that particular influenza virus, but it's probably not good for a new influenza virus you've never seen. So what vaccination does is it tries to simulate an infection in the individual by presenting it with something that allows it to mount an immune response against that foreign thing. So in this case we'll say it's an influenza, but doesn't make you sick. And so there's a couple of ways that we can do this. The most common way, the way that it was originally developed, is to use something that looks like the invading virus you're trying to protect against, something like influenza or the original vaccine against smallpox using a cow virus called cowpox, so that your immune system mounts this response against it and is then protected against the highly virulent thing further down. Or because we now have science and science has advanced far enough uh in the last 50 years that we can do this, we can say there are certain parts of that virus or certain parts of that bug, and those are all we care about. The rest is irrelevant to the immune system. All you need to do is block the capacity of that thing to cause disease, and you can do that with specific antibodies, or we can put those in vaccines. And so when you hear somebody talk about neutralizing immunity or neutralizing antibody titers, what they're talking about is the ability to mount an immune response that blocks that specific thing. So at its heart, the acquired immune system is there to respond specifically to individual infectious agents and to give you this memory capacity to respond efficiently and the second time so that no longer do you get infected, you clear it before you get the infection. That's the whole idea of vaccination.