Interstitial lung diseases are thought to be associated with the infiltration of activated T-lymphocytes. To induce an effective immune response, antigen-presenting cells have to not only present antigenic peptide with major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules to T-lymphocytes but also express B7 molecules. Therefore, the expression of B7-1, B7-2 and class II MHC molecules was investigat...

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a chronic progressive disease of unknown aetiology. It has a very poor prognosis and no effective treatment. There are two major barriers to the development of novel treatments in IPF: an incomplete understanding of its pathogenesis and the fact that current models of the disease are poorly predictive of therapeutic response. Recent studies suggest an impo...

introduction: idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (ipf) is a relentlessly progressive and usually fatal lung disease of unknown etiology for which no effective treatments currently exist. in the adults type i and ii pneumocytes, forms components of the alveolar epithelial cells. in this study, we investigated the effect of thalidomide on the alveolar epithelial cells (type i and ii pneumocytes) in th...

RATIONALE Alveolar epithelial cell apoptosis and protease/antiprotease imbalance based proteolysis play central roles in the pathogenesis of pulmonary emphysema but molecular mechanisms underlying these two events are not yet clearly understood. Cell adhesion molecule 1 (CADM1) is a lung epithelial cell adhesion molecule in the immunoglobulin superfamily. It generates two membrane associated C ...

Two set of 2-aryl-5,6-dihydropyrrolo[2,1-a] isoquinolines were designed and synthesized to evaluate their biological activities as topoisomerase inhibitors. Cytotoxic activity of the synthesized compounds 4a-e and 7a-d was assessed against several human cancer cell lines, including MCF-7 (breast cancer cell), HepG2 (liver hepatocellular cells), A549 (adenocarcinomic human alveolar basal epithel...

OBJECTIVE To investigate bilirubin-induced lung alveolar epithelial cell injury together with the protection afforded by dexmedetomidine. DESIGN Prospective, randomized, controlled study. SETTING Research laboratory. SUBJECTS Sprague Dawley rats. INTERVENTIONS Alveolar epithelial A549 cell lines were cultured and received bilirubin (from 0 to 160 μM) to explore the protective pathway of...

Alveolar epithelial cells outnumber alveolar macrophages by ~500 fold and increasing evidence suggests Mycobacterium tuberculosis may replicate dramatically in these cells during the initial weeks of infecting the lung [1,2]. Here, we report in experimental detail the transcriptional profiling of Mycobacterium tuberculosis replicating at 72 hr post-infection in the human type II alveolar epithe...

Sepsis results in the formation of pulmonary edema by increasing in epithelial permeability. Therefore we hypothesized that alveolar epithelial cells isolated from septic animals develop tight junctions with different protein composition and reduced barrier function relative to alveolar epithelial cells from healthy animals. Male rats (200-300 g) were sacrificed 24 hours after cecal ligation an...

Lung fluid balance is critically dependent on capillary endothelial and alveolar epithelial barrier properties, and cytoskeletal components have been implicated in these barrier functions. In an earlier study, we perfused Clostridium botulinum C2 toxin, which effects selective loss of non-muscle F-actin, through isolated rabbit lungs: a severalfold increase in the capillary filtration coefficie...

Elevated CO(2) levels (hypercapnia) occur in patients with respiratory diseases and impair alveolar epithelial integrity, in part, by inhibiting Na,K-ATPase function. Here, we examined the role of c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) in CO(2) signaling in mammalian alveolar epithelial cells as well as in diptera, nematodes and rodent lungs. In alveolar epithelial cells, elevated CO(2) levels rapidly i...