BACKGROUND HLA directed antibodies play an important role in acute and chronic allograft rejection. During viral infection of a patient with HLA antibodies, the HLA antibody levels may rise even though there is no new immunization with antigen. However it is not known whether the converse occurs, and whether changes on non-donor specific antibodies are associated with any outcomes following HLA...

Children and adults with congenital heart disease (CHD) can require interventions that result in immunologic alterations that are different than those seen in patients with cardiomyopathies. Patients with CHD can be exposed to heart surgeries, blood products, valved and non-valved allograft tissue, and mechanical circulatory support, all of which can alter the immunologic status of these patien...

Promising results from clinical trials have led to renewed interest in effector mechanisms operating in antibody-based therapy of leukemia and lymphoma. We tested a panel of B-cell antibodies from the Sixth Human Leukocyte Differentiation Antigen workshop for their capacity to mediate antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity, often considered to be one of the most potent effector mechanisms in ...

Previous studies have shown that influenza virus-immune cytotoxic T lymphocytes can recognize virus in conjunction with self HLA-A2 antigens. Nevertheless, the virus-infected target cells from one HLA-A2-positive male donor (designated M7) could not be lysed by the virus-immune cytotoxic lymphocytes from any HLA-A2-matched unrelated donors. Although extensive serological analyses showed no diff...

Background Lupus nephritis (LN) is one of the main clinical challenges in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and a cause significant morbidity mortality. Genetic contribution to SLE pathogenesis important, genetic profiling through polygenic risk scores has been shown useful stratify patients according dominating molecular disease mechanism. [1] This not, however, investigated for specific mani...

Antitumor antibodies with the same specificity as cytotoxic T lymphocytes that recognize antigenic peptides encoded by tumor-associated genes and presented by MHC class I molecules would be valuable tools to analyze the antigenicity or target tumor cells in vivo. To obtain a human antibody directed against a peptide encoded by gene melanoma-associated antigen (MAGE)-A1 and presented by HLA-A1 m...

Kidney transplantation is now accepted to be the best treatment for patients with end-stage renal disease, conferring an increased survival and a better quality of life compared to dialysis [1-2]. There has been an improvement in allograft survival in the last decades [3-4] and mostly in the short-term outcomes, in part because we have a better understanding and a better control of the cellular...

The advent of solid phase assays and in particular the single antigen bead (SAB) assay, on the Luminex platform has led to previously unheralded levels of HLA-specific antibody characterisation. However, it soon became apparent that the detection of antibodies detected by these assays was less than perfect and that not all antibodies determined could be considered clinically relevant. Thus, the...

The aim of this study was to investigate HLA class II associations in polymyositis (PM) and dermatomyositis (DM), and to determine how these associations influence clinical and serological differences. DNA samples were obtained from 225 UK Caucasian idiopathic inflammatory myopathy patients (PM = 117, DM = 108) and compared with 537 randomly selected UK Caucasian controls. All cases had also be...

Intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) is increasingly used for the treatment of autoimmune diseases and the prevention of infections and of graft versus host reactions in recipients of allogeneic bone marrow transplants. The immunomodulatory effects of IVIg are largely dependent on their ability to interact with membrane molecules of lymphocytes. We report here that IVIg recognizes the B07.75-84 pe...