Looking up gingipain in wikipedia;



If blocking gingipain turns out to be effective in reducing alzheimers--maybe it does so at the expense of expanding our understanding of diseases of inflammation. Yes, I think that counts as a joke. Please don't judge me.

Point being--what we call inflammation, immune response, etc. is a lot more involved than these labels imply. Inflammation broadly speaking is a change in the local interior environment. Besides fighting infection--our cell's genetic and epigenetic expression, differentiation etc. are all dependent on environment. These "inflammatory" cytokines have important roles to play throughout the development and maintenance of the brain and other organs. Mal-expressed cells could obviously cause all sorts of problems in a multi-celled organism.

Also besides attacking foreign invaders, the immune system has the job of degrading various host proteins etc. when appropriate, maybe that's relevant when we're looking at accumulation of tau and amyloid.