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Idiosyncratic adverse drug reactions are unpredictable, dose independent and potentially life threatening; this makes them a major factor contributing to the cost and uncertainty of drug development. Clinical data suggest that many such reactions involve immune mechanisms, and genetic association studies have identified strong linkage between drug hypersensitivity reactions to several drugs and specific HLA alleles. One of the strongest such genetic associations found has been for the antiviral drug abacavir, which causes severe adverse reactions exclusively in patients expressing the HLA molecular variant B*57:01. Abacavir adverse reactions were recently shown to be driven by drug-specific activation of cytokine-producing, cytotoxic CD8+ T cells that required HLA-B*57:01 molecules for their function. However, the mechanism by which abacavir induces this pathologic T cell response remains unclear. Here we show that abacavir can bind within the F-pocket of the peptide-binding groove of HLA-B*57:01 thereby altering its specificity. This supports a novel explanation for HLA-linked idiosyncratic adverse drug reactions; namely that drugs can alter the repertoire of self-peptides presented to T cells thus causing the equivalent of an alloreactive T cell response. Indeed, we identified specific self-peptides that are presented only in the presence of abacavir, and that were recognized by T cells of hypersensitive patients. The assays we have established can be applied to test additional compounds with suspected HLA linked hypersensitivities in vitro. Where successful, these assays could speed up the discovery and mechanistic understanding of HLA linked hypersensitivities as well as guide the development of safer drugs.
An unsolved challenge in the development of antigen specific immunotherapies is determining the optimal antigens to target. Comprehension of antigen-MHC binding is paramount towards achieving this goal. Here, we present CASTELO, a combined machine le
Some bacteria and archaea possess an immune system, based on the CRISPR-Cas mechanism, that confers adaptive immunity against phage. In such species, individual bacteria maintain a cassette of viral DNA elements called spacers as a memory of past inf
We consider the problem of self tolerance in the frame of a minimalistic model of the idiotypic network. A node of this network represents a population of B lymphocytes of the same idiotype which is encoded by a bit string. The links of the network c
We consider self-tolerance and its failure -autoimmunity- in a minimal mathematical model of the idiotypic network. A node in the network represents a clone of B-lymphocytes and its antibodies of the same idiotype which is encoded by a bitstring. The
This paper reports nano-CT analysis of brain tissues of schizophrenia and control cases. The analysis revealed that: (1) neuronal structures vary between individuals, (2) the mean curvature of distal neurites of the schizophrenia cases was 1.5 times