BACKGROUND Chagas disease is a major health problem in Latin America, and an emerging infectious disease in the US. Previously, we have screened the Trypanosoma cruzi sequence database by a computational/bioinformatics approach, and identified antigens that exhibited the characteristics of vaccine candidates. METHODOLOGY We investigated the protective efficacy of a multi-component DNA-prime/p...

CD4+ CD25+ Foxp3+ regulatory T cells (Tregs) are highly sensitive to IL-2, one of the many cytokines produced during immune responses, for their development, survival and functions. Although effects IL-2 administration on Tregs in vivo well characterized, elicited by an response have not been elucidated. Hence, this study, Treg behaviour IL-2–producing responses was explored using vitro murine ...

Salmonella Typhimurium strain expressing the Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae antigens, ApxIA, ApxIIA, ApxIIIA and OmpA, was previously constructed as a vaccine candidate for porcine pleuropneumonia. This strain was a live attenuated (∆lon∆cpxR∆asd)Salmonella as a delivery host and contained a vector containing asd. An immunological study of lymphocyte proliferation, T-lymphocyte subsets and cyt...

A lymphocyte blastogenesis inhibitory factor (LBIF) has been characterized as an immunoregulatory molecule, especially on the T-lymphocyte proliferation. Using fast protein liquid chromatography-purified LBIF, we examined the effect of LBIF on the proliferation of various 18 tumor cell lines in vitro in comparison with those of interferon-alpha, interferon-gamma, tumor necrosis factor-alpha, tr...

Sepsis induces extensive apoptosis in T and B cells suggesting that the loss of immune effector cells could be one explanation for the profound immunosuppression observed in this disorder. Unfortunately, the mechanisms responsible for lymphocyte apoptosis in sepsis remain unknown. In T cells, apoptosis can occur through activation-induced cell death (AICD) in which engagement of the Ag receptor...

Background and Aims: Total hip arthroplasty (THA) is a common orthopedic surgery. The main focus in the research of THA is immune responses in these patients following the blood transfusion.Therefore, in this study, we evaluated the immune modulation indexes such as T cell amplification, Tcell surface markers and also production of cytokines in the patients undergoing THA surgery following bloo...

PURPOSE To investigate the effects of docosahexaenoic-(DHA)-rich fish oil (FO) supplementation on lymphocyte function before and after a marathon race. METHODS Twenty-one athletes participated in this study. Eight marathon runners were supplemented with 3 g of FO daily for 60 d (FO group), and 13 athletes were not supplemented (C group). The following measures of lymphocytes were taken before...

Imidazoquinolines are synthetic toll-like receptor 7 and 8 agonists and potent dendritic cell activators with established anticancer activity. Here we test the hypothesis that imidazoquinoline has in vivo efficacy within established renal cell carcinoma (RCC) tumors. Immunocompetent mice bearing syngeneic RCC xenografts were treated with imidazoquinoline or placebo at two separate time points. ...

It is well known that the activation of lymphoid cells differ significantly depending on their lineage/subset and differentiation stages. Among the variety of cytokines characterized until today, essentially all the cytokines appear not to be strictly specific to any of the subset of lymphocytes. For example, all the interleukins including IL-2, IL-4 and IL-5 are not specific for B or T lymphoc...