ABSTRACT
Immune-mediated toxicity is still a relatively new area in mechanistic toxicology. It is also one of the most complex fields in toxicology. Many aspects are poorly understood and a detailed understanding is only slowly emerging. As the immune system is vital to protect our body from foreign invaders, it harbors an intrinsic arsenal of potentially dangerous effector mechanisms which under certain conditions can become directed against our own cells or tissues. To prevent this, it is only logical that nature has endowed the immune system with many rigorous control mechanisms, redundancies to ensure proper function, inhibitors, and multi-pathway regulatory mechanisms.
