Innate immunity: impact on the adaptive immune response.

For many years, innate immunity has been considered as a separate entity from the adaptive immune response and has been regarded to be of secondary importance in the hierarchy of immune functions. For the past few years, however, interest in innate immunity has grown enormously, so that now it is studied intensively in many laboratories that seek to integrate these two distinct types of immune function. Our intent in this review is to point out the similarities and differences in these two types of host response to infection, and to indicate our present level of understanding of how these can be integrated into a more complete description of the immune response.