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Interleukin (IL)-18 is a newly discovered cytokine, structurally similar to IL-1, with profound effects on T-cell activation. This short review summarizes the present knowledge on IL-18, to give an insight into the future perspectives for its possible use as vaccine adjuvant. Formerly called interferon (IFN) γ inducing factor (IGIF), IL-18 is the new name of a novel cytokine that plays an important...
The analysis of cytokine profiles helps to clarify functional properties of immune cells, both for research and for clinical diagnosis. The real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is becoming widely used to quantify cytokines from cells, body fluids, tissues, or tissue biopsies. Being a very powerful and sensitive method it can be used to quantify mRNA expression levels...
Microdialysis sampling is a well-known method for collection of low molecular weight hydrophilic analytes. Due to the success of this sampling technique for these analytes, many researchers have wanted to extend the use of this method to a wider range of analytes—particularly proteins and peptides. These analytes pose unique challenges during microdialysis sampling. The primary challenges are the...
A large number of cytokines have been characterized, of which several have proved successful in the clinic as biotherapeutic agents for malignant, infectious or autoimmune diseases. As biologically active proteins, they cannot be fully characterized by physicochemical methods alone. Thus, biological assays (bioassays) have become increasingly important for their biological characterization and potency...
Gene expression in diseased tissues can indicate the contribution to a disease process and potentially guide therapeutic decision-making. Archival tissues with associated clinical outcome may be useful to discover or validate the role of a candidate gene in a disease process or the response to therapy. Such archival tissues are commonly formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded, restricting the methods...
Cytokines are pivotal to a balanced innate or cell-mediated immune response, and can be indicative of disease progression and/or resolution. Methods to measure key cytokines rapidly with accuracy, precision, and sensitivity are consequently important. The current assay technologies, which are based on RT-PCR, immunoassays, or bioassays, are limited in their use in the clinic, in particular because...
Aptamers are short nucleic acid sequences that are used as ligands to bind their targets with high affinity. They are generated via the combinatorial chemistry procedure systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX). Aptamers have shown much promise towards detection of a variety of protein targets, including cytokines. Specifically, for the determination of cytokines and growth...
Cytokines, which are small peptides that act as hormones of the immune system, affect cells throughout the body in a variety of different ways. These cellular signaling molecules often have synergistic or opposing effects on various cell types and often different cytokines have overlapping activities. There is great advantage, therefore, to be able to assess a pattern of cytokine responses in certain...
Vaccines that can prime the adaptive immune system for a quick and effective response against a pathogen or tumor cells, require the generation of antigen (Ag)-specific memory T and B cells. The unique ability of dendritic cells (DCs) to activate naïve T cells, implies a key role for DCs in this process. The generation of tumor-specific CD8 + cytotoxic T cells (CTLs) is dependent on both T...
This review is focused on methods that are used to derive hematopoietic cells from embryonic stem cells (ESCs). One of the strategies that have been recently used to achieve this goal is an approach of mimicking the hematopoietic niche in vitro by using hematopoiesis-supportive feeder cells, cocktails of soluble hematopoietic growth factors and a variety of matrices. While there is clear evidence...
Streptococcus pyogenes causes severe invasive infections: the post-streptococcal sequelae of acute rheumatic fever (RF) and rheumatic heart disease (RHD), acute glomerulonephritis, and uncomplicated pharyngitis and pyoderma. Efforts to produce a vaccine against S. pyogenes began several decades ago, and different models have been proposed. Here, we describe the methodology used in the development...
This manuscript focuses on the detection of viral nucleic acids by in situ based methodologies. The optimal protocol depends on the virus. We will describe protocols for viral RNA detection by reverse transcriptase (RT) in situ PCR. We will also directly compare this method to the detection of viral RNA using standard in situ hybridization with locked nucleic acid (LNA) probes. Most DNA viruses are...
Pro and anti-inflammatory cytokines are involved in disease onset and pathophysiology of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. It is likely that panels of multiple cytokines provide a good reflection of disease status and can be used as biological markers in body fluids. Different multi-plex platforms, Luminex-xMAP and Meso Scale Discovery, are able to detect multiple analytes...
In this review, a novel non-invasive approach based on skin surface wash sampling is described. Since the epidermis possesses a high metabolic activity, the secretion of various biomarkers can be exploited to develop non-invasive procedures for skin measurement to monitor disorders and to define a therapeutic strategy. Thus, we developed a method for the quantification of skin surface compounds. In...
Cytokines are important in the understanding of the immune process in health and disease and are valuable indicators in diagnostics. Measurements of cytokines are based on immunometric methods, and it is important to understand possible pitfalls in these methods to produce reliable cytokine data. This paper focuses on obtaining optimal measurements when applying enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA)...
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