• Complement and coagulation are both blood-based proteolytic cascades and integral defence mechanisms that typically protect against pathogen invasion and bleeding.
  • Although they have distinct functions, complement and coagulation share many structural motifs, are evolutionary linked and several points of cross-talk between each pathway has been recently identified.
  • However, the mechanisms by which these systems co-operate to maintain health and their role in disease pathogenesis, when dysregulated, is still incompletely understood.
  • Our group have recently characterised one aspect of this cross-talk, which occurs between thrombomodulin and factor H. We found that the anticoagulant thrombomodulin has moderate complement regulatory activity that is both factor H-dependent and independent (Heurich et al 2016).