L IVER transplantation has been increasingly used to treat end-stage liver diseases since the introduction of Cy A in combination with other immunosuppressive agents. 1 Although Cy A has a powerful immunosuppressive effect on allograft rejection, many transplant recipients still experience rejection episodes that are often irreversible. The nephrotoxicity of Cy A in some recipients has necessit...

Over the last few decades, tremendous progress has been made in understanding the mechanisms of immune responses. This progress has also led to a more detailed knowledge of the processes leading to the loss of self-tolerance and the destruction of self-tissue in the case of autoimmune diseases, the effector mechanism involved in transplant allograft rejection as well as the driving factors in e...

Cortex pseudolaricis, the root bark of Pseudolarix kaempferi Gord, has been used to treat tinea and other skin diseases for the antimicrobial activities in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Pseudolaric acid B (PAB) has been identified as the major component responsible for the action of C. pseudolaricis. Recently, PAB has been demonstrated to be used as novel treatments for cancer, immune dis...

BACKGROUND In head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), the secretion of various immunosuppressive mediators contributes to large-scale effects on the immune functions. The influence of HNSCC on various cellular functions of human myeloid dendritic cells (MDC) was analyzed in this work. MATERIALS AND METHODS MDCs were isolated from peripheral blood by 'magnetic bead separation'. Cellular...

As we enter the millennium, the most widely acknowledged advancement in transplantation has been the development of more selective and potent immunosuppressive agents. In the early period of transplantation, the selection of maintenance immunosuppression was limited to the combination of azathioprine and corticosteroids. Unfortunately, these agents were relatively non-specific and ineffective a...

FOLLOWING Borel's description of a new immunosuppressive agent, a fungal cyclic peptide, Cyclosporin A (CyA), which had immunosuppressive action 1 a number of experimental papers demonstrated that the agent was a potent inhibitor of rejection of organ allografts in a variety of species 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Green and Allison 9 found that a short period of treatment with CyA given to rabbits with...

BACKGROUND Sporadic non-clustered hospital-associated listeriosis is an emerging infectious disease in immunocompromised hosts. The current study was designed to determine the impact of long-term and precipitating immunosuppressive agents and underlying diseases on triggering the expression of the disease, and to compare the clinical features and outcome of hospital-associated and community-ass...

Ozone (O3), a major component of photochemical air pollution, is a strong oxidizing agent and highly toxic. Resident alveolar macrophages (AM) play an important immunomodulatory role in the lung via suppression of lymphocyte proliferation, thus limiting the magnitude and duration of local immune responses. Nitric oxide (NO) plays a crucial role in the immunosuppressive activity of AM. However, ...