Search results for "immune disease"

The fungal lactone oxacyclododecindione is a potential new therapeutic substance in the treatment of lupus-associated kidney disease.

2013

Recently oxacyclododecindione (Oxa), a macrocyclic lactone isolated from the imperfect fungus Exserohilum rostratum, has been described as a potent transcription inhibitor of inducible proinflammatory and profibrotic genes in cell culture models. As kidney disease in systemic lupus erythematosus is characterized by aberrant expression of inflammatory mediators and infiltration of immune cells, we investigated the effect of Oxa in MRL-Fas(lpr) mice, a model of systemic lupus erythematosus. These mice develop a spontaneous T-cell and macrophage-dependent autoimmune disease including severe glomerulonephritis that shares features with human lupus. Comparable to the results of in vitro models, …

Cholera-Like Enterotoxins and Regulatory T cells

2010

Cholera toxin (CT) and the heat-labile enterotoxin of E. coli (LT), as well as their non toxic mutants, are potent mucosal adjuvants of immunization eliciting mucosal and systemic responses against unrelated co-administered antigens in experimental models and in humans (non toxic mutants). These enterotoxins are composed of two subunits, the A subunit, responsible for an ADP-ribosyl transferase activity and the B subunit, responsible for cell binding. Paradoxically, whereas the whole toxins have adjuvant properties, the B subunits of CT (CTB) and of LT (LTB) have been shown to induce antigen specific tolerance when administered mucosally with antigens in experimental models as well as, rece…

Dependence on nuclear factor of activated T-cells (NFAT) levels discriminates conventional T cells from Foxp3 + regulatory T cells

2012

Several lines of evidence suggest nuclear factor of activated T-cells (NFAT) to control regulatory T cells: thymus-derived naturally occurring regulatory T cells (nTreg) depend on calcium signals, the Foxp3 gene harbors several NFAT binding sites, and the Foxp3 (Fork head box P3) protein interacts with NFAT. Therefore, we investigated the impact of NFAT on Foxp3 expression. Indeed, the generation of peripherally induced Treg (iTreg) by TGF-β was highly dependent on NFAT expression because the ability of CD4 + T cells to differentiate into iTreg diminished markedly with the number of NFAT family members missing. It can be concluded that the expression of Foxp3 in TGF-β–induced iTreg depends…

Interferon alfa–induced sarcoidosis resolving without drug withdrawal

2016

Sarcoidosis is an uncommon systemic granulomatous disease of unknown origin affecting lung, skin, liver, and other tissues. Noncaseating granulomas in the involved organs are the hallmark of this disease. An exaggerated immune response to an unknown antigenic stimulus could play a role in sarcoidosis development. Lung is one of the most frequently involved organs.1 Manifestations range from alveolitis to granulomatous infiltration of alveoli, bronchi, and blood vessels. The end stage of lung sarcoidosis is development of interstitial fibrosis with “honeycombing” of lung parenchyma. Interferon alfa in association with ribavirin is the treatment of choice for hepatitis C. Early treatment of a…

NFAT transcription factors in control of peripheral T cell tolerance.

2006

The Ca++-regulated calcineurin/NFAT cascade is one of the crucial signalling pathways that controls adaptive immunity. However, a number of novel experimental data suggest that, in addition to their role in T cell activation, NFATc transcription factors play also a decisive role in the generation of peripheral tolerance against self-antigens. This function of NFATc factors is mediated by controlling activation-induced cell death and clonal anergy of T helper cells and the activity of regulatory T cells. The multi-functional role of NFATc proteins characterize these transcription factors as key regulators of immunological tolerance and, if dysregulated, of development of autoimmune diseases.

Deep CNN for IIF Images Classification in Autoimmune Diagnostics

2019

The diagnosis and monitoring of autoimmune diseases are very important problem in medicine. The most used test for this purpose is the antinuclear antibody (ANA) test. An indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) test performed by Human Epithelial type 2 (HEp-2) cells as substrate antigen is the most common methods to determine ANA. In this paper we present an automatic HEp-2 specimen system based on a convolutional neural network method able to classify IIF images. The system consists of a module for features extraction based on a pre-trained AlexNet network and a classification phase for the cell-pattern association using six support vector machines and a k-nearest neighbors classifier. The class…

Deep Convolutional Neural Network for HEp-2 fluorescence intensity classification

2019

Indirect ImmunoFluorescence (IIF) assays are recommended as the gold standard method for detection of antinuclear antibodies (ANAs), which are of considerable importance in the diagnosis of autoimmune diseases. Fluorescence intensity analysis is very often complex, and depending on the capabilities of the operator, the association with incorrect classes is statistically easy. In this paper, we present a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) system to classify positive/negative fluorescence intensity of HEp-2 IIF images, which is important for autoimmune diseases diagnosis. The method uses the best known pre-trained CNNs to extract features and a support vector machine (SVM) classifier for the …

Cytoplasmic autoantigens in autoimmune hepatitis: molecular analysis and clinical relevance.

1991

RNA mediated toll-like receptor stimulation in health and disease

2012

Besides their well known functions in storage and translation of information nucleic acids have emerged as a target of pattern recognition receptors that drive activation of innate immunity. Due to the paucity of building block monomers used in nucleic acids, discrimination of host and microbial nucleic acids as a means of self/foreign discrimination is a complicated task. Pattern recognition receptors rely on discrimination by sequence, structural features and spatial compartmentalization to differentiate microbial derived nucleic acids from host ones. Microbial nucleic acid detection is important for the sensing of infectious danger and initiating an immune response to microbial attack. F…

Identification of target antigen for SLA/LP autoantibodies in autoimmune hepatitis.

2000

Summary Background Autoantibodies are a hallmark of autoimmune hepatitis, but most are not disease specific. Autoantibodies to soluble liver antigen (SLA) and to liver and pancreas antigen (LP) have been described as disease specific, occurring in about 30% of all patients with autoimmune hepatitis, but no standardised assays are available. Methods We tested 2000 serum samples from patients with various liver diseases and controls for SLA autoantibodies by inhibition ELISA. Serum samples positive for SLA antibodies were used for immunoscreening of cDNA expression libraries. Identified clones were tested against a panel of serum samples positive for SLA and LP autoantibodies and control seru…