CP and Opportunistic infection: In our earlier investigations with bone marrow cells, we demonstrated that delivery of dsDNA fragments to experimental animals during double-strand breaks (DSB; the major intermediates in the repair of CP-induced DNA damage) repair resulted in elimination of the lymphoid lineage, which in turn led to a failure of the immune system with the consequent development of opportunistic infection, systemic inflammation, multiple organ failure, and eventual death of the animal (23).