Impact of switching from mycophenolate mofetil to enteric-coated mycophenolate sodium on gastrointestinal side effects in patients with autoimmune disease: a Phase III, open-label, single-arm, multicenter study
Bernhard Manger,1 Falk Hiepe,2 Matthias Schneider,3 Margitta Worm,4 Peter Wimmer,5 Eva-Maria Paulus,5 Andreas Schwarting6 1University Hospital Erlangen, Med Clinic III Polyclinic, Erlangen, 2Rheumatology, University Hospital Charité, Campus Mitte, Berlin, 3Policlinic of Rheumatology, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf, 4Department of Dermatology, Venereology and Allergology, University Hospital Charité, Campus Mitte, Berlin, 5Novartis Pharma GmbH, Nürnberg, 6Department of Internal Medicine, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany Background: The purpose of this study was to assess changes in gastrointestinal symptom severity in pati…
Autoantibody detection using indirect immunofluorescence on HEp-2 cells
The detection of autoantibodies is an important element in the diagnosis and monitoring of disease progression in patients with autoimmune diseases. In laboratory diagnostic tests for connective tissue and autoimmune liver diseases, indirect immunofluorescence on HEp-2 cells plays a central role in a multistage diagnostic process. Despite the high quality of diagnostics, findings at different laboratories can differ considerably due to a lack of standardization, as well as subjective factors. The present paper formulates recommendations for the standardized processing and interpretation of the HEp-2 cell test for the detection of non-organ-specific (especially antinuclear) antibodies. It pr…
Guidelines for the use of flow cytometry and cell sorting in immunological studies
The marriage between immunology and cytometry is one of the most stable and productive in the recent history of science. A rapid search in PubMed shows that, as of July 2017, using “flow cytometry immunology” as a search term yields more than 68 000 articles, the first of which, interestingly, is not about lymphocytes. It might be stated that, after a short engagement, the exchange of the wedding rings between immunology and cytometry officially occurred when the idea to link fluorochromes to monoclonal antibodies came about. After this, recognizing different types of cells became relatively easy and feasible not only by using a simple fluorescence microscope, but also by a complex and some…