subsystem of the overall immune system that is composed of highly specialized, systemic cells and processes that eliminate pathogens or prevent their growth
A scanning electron microscope image of a single human lymphocyte The adaptive immune system (AIS), also known as the acquired immune system or specific immune system, is a subsystem of the immune system that is composed of specialized cells, organs, and processes that eliminate pathogens specifically. The acquired immune system is one of the two main immunity strategies found in vertebrates (the other being the innate immune system).
Like the innate system, the adaptive immune system includes both humoral immunity components and cell-mediated immunity components and destroys invading pathogens. Unlike the innate immune system, which is pre-programmed to react to common broad categories of pathogen, the adaptive immune system is highly specific to each particular pathogen the body has encountered.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).