Eosinophils are multifunctional granulocytes that contribute to initiation and modulation of inflammation. Their role in asthma and parasitic infections has long been recognized. Growing evidence now reveals a role for eosinophils in autoimmune diseases. In this review, we summarize the function of eosinophils in inflammatory bowel diseases, neuromyelitis optica, bullous pemphigoid, autoimmune ...

Autoimmune diseases (ADs) are featured by body's immune responses being directed towards its own specific target organs or multiple organ systems, causing persistent inflammation and consequent tissue damage. miRNAs are small noncoding RNAs in a size of approximately 22 nt that play important regulatory roles in many organisms by cleavage or translational inhibition of targeted mRNAs. Many miRN...

1 Department of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology, The First Hospital of Xiamen University, Xiamen 361003, China 2Department of Biological Sciences, University of Texas at El Paso, 500 West University Avenue, El Paso, TX 79968, USA 3Microbiology, College of Medicine University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE 68198-7660, USA 4Department of Rheumatology, Peking Union Medical College Hosp...

Epigenetics is defined as the study of all inheritable and potentially reversible changes in genome function that do not alter the nucleotide sequence within the DNA. Epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation, histone modification, nucleosome positioning, and microRNAs (miRNAs) are essential to carry out key functions in the regulation of gene expression. Therefore, the epigenetic mechanism...

Immunotherapy has the potential to modify or re-balance the immune system and hence useful in the management of autoimmune conditions. This article aims to review clinically useful immunotherapies available for treatment of autoimmune conditions, with particular emphasis on Type I diabetes mellitus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus. A Medline search for ...

More than 30 years ago, the occurrence of spontaneous autoimmune thyroiditis was observed in rodents that were made severely T-cell lymphopenic by neonatal thymectomy or by thymectomy at week five after birth together with concomitant low dose irradiation [1,2]. Following these reports, numerous studies have shown that manipulations that generate functional T-cell lymphopenia result in the deve...

Neutrophils are the major antimicrobial cells of the innate immune system, which are recruited rapidly to the sites of infection and provide the primary defense against pathogens. Recent evidence suggests that neutrophils undergo a distinct cell death mechanism called NETosis, which not only contributes to the host defense, but also leads to severe pathological immune responses in cases of dysr...