Current Immunology Reviews (Discontinued) - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2006

Heat shock proteins exert their beneficial effects via basically two modes of action depending on their relative location within the host. Intracellular heat shock proteins found within cells serve a cytoprotective role by chaperoning naïve, misfolded and/or denatured proteins in response to stressful stimuli by a process known as the stress response. However, stressful stimuli also induce the release of intracellular heat shock Read More

Macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) describes one of the first cytokine activities to be discovered, but the precise role of this immunologic mediator in the host response only now is being understood. MIF is produced constitutively by diverse cell types, and it circulates normally in the blood at low but immunoregulatory concentrations. Diverse pro-inflammatory or invasive stimuli lead to a rapid upregulation in the relea Read More

Coxiella burnetii, an obligate intracellular bacterium, causes Q fever, a severe infectious disease. Its high infectivity results in large outbreaks and makes C. burnetii a potential biological weapon. C. burnetii survives within monocytes/ macrophages through a strategy based on the subversion of receptor-mediated phagocytosis and the prevention of phagosome maturation. In addition, the intracellular life of C. burnetii clearly dep Read More

The predominant pathway leading to Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) class I presentation of endogenous peptides includes their transport via Transporter associated with Antigen Processing (TAP) molecules. From TAP deficient cells it is, however, known that the ligands of some MHC class I alleles can be presented in a TAP-independent fashion. Professional Antigen Presenting Cells (APCs), which present exogenously a Read More

Endocrine regulation of the neutrophilic component of innate immunity with a particular focus on the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) is the subject of this review. Endocrine hormones contribute to neutrophil mediated pathology in several ways either by directly activating the cells, as is the case with an angiotensin activation of NADPH oxidase on neutrophils and monocytes to contribute to atherosclerosis, or by havi Read More

Dendritic cells (DC) are the most potent antigens presenting cells with the capacity to stimulate naive T cells and induce primary and secondary immune responses. Due to these features DC have been exploited for vaccine delivery in an attempt to actively immunize cancer patients, but the vaccine- induced immune responses have achieved partial success but are not yet sufficient to attain robust and durable therapeutic eff Read More

T lymphocytes undergo a complex series of developmental events in the thymus to become mature but naive circulating T cells. These naive T cells are activated during the response to pathogens to produce immune mediators and undergo further differentiation to give rise to distinct types of effector or memory cells. Each of these differentiation and activation events leads to major changes in gene expression patterns. The ch Read More

Fusions of dendritic cells (DC) and tumor cells are increasingly used in tumor immunotherapy. The strategy for DC-tumor fusion vaccine is based on the fact that DC are the most potent antigen-presenting cells in the body, whereas tumor cells express abundant tumor antigens. The fusion of these two cell types creates a heterokaryon with both DCderived costimulatory molecules, efficient antigen- processing and -presentatio Read More