Click to read Dr. Felipe Almeida de Pinho Ribeiro’s first-authored paper “Bacteria hijack a meningeal neuroimmune axis to facilitate brain invasion“ published in Nature – the leading international weekly journal of science.
The meninges are densely innervated by nociceptive sensory neurons that mediate pain and headache. Bacterial meningitis causes life-threatening infections of the meninges and central nervous system, affecting more than 2.5 million people a year. How pain and neuroimmune interactions impact meningeal antibacterial host defences are unclear. Here we show that Nav1.8+ nociceptors signal to immune cells in the meninges through the neuropeptide calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) during infection.