Never has so much progress been reported in immunology as at this congress. The full impact of new technologies, developed since the late 1970s, has come to fruition: gene isolation, mutation, transfection and expression, protein structure and peptide synthesis, cell cloning, hybridization and monoclonal antibodies, CD serology, SCID and transgenic mice, modern immunomudulation and vaccines. An overwhelming mass of data has accumulated over the last years. The reports are up-to-date and ou...

It has been a challenge for us to edit this volume of Endocrinology and Metabo lism: Progress in Research and Clinical Practice. The topic of the pathogenesis of insulin-dependent, type I diabetes mellitus is particularly appropriate for this series, since advances in this area have been made, to a large extent, by applying state-of-the-art laboratory techniques to clinical samples. Over the last several years, a number of lines of evidence have been gathered, suggesting that classic type ...

A sense of belonging is basic to the human experience. But in this, humans are not unique. Essentially all life, from bacteria to humans, have ways by which it determines which members belong and which do not. This is a basic cooperative nature of life I call group membership which is examined in this book. However, cooperation of living things is not easily accounted for by current theory of evolutionary biology and yet even viruses display group membership. That viruses have this feature...

Muscle disease represents an important health threat to the general population. There is essentially no cure. Gene therapy holds great promise to correct the genetic defects and eventually achieve full recovery in these diseases. Significant progresses have been made in the field of muscle gene therapy over the last few years. The development of novel gene delivery vectors has substantially enhanced specificity and efficiency of muscle gene delivery. The new knowledge on the immune respons...

Tumor-Induced Immune Suppression - Prospects and Progress in Mechanisms and Therapeutic Reversalpresents a comprehensive overview of large number of different mechanisms of immune dysfunction in cancer and therapeutic approaches to their correction. This includes the number of novel mechanisms that has never before been discussed in previous monographs.The last decades were characterized by substantial progress in the understanding of the role of the immune system in tumor...

This Brief describes the concept and realization of gene therapy for HIV from the unique historic perspective and insight of two pioneers of the clinical applications of stem cell gene therapy for HIV.Gerhard Bauer applied ribozyme-anti-HIV and other vectors to manufacture clinical grade, HIV-resistant hematopoietic stem cells for the first patients that received stem cell gene therapy for HIV, including the first child in the world and the first fully marrow-ablated HIV infected p...

Androgens are critical regulators of prostate differentiation and function, as well as prostate cancer growth and survival. Therefore, androgen ablation is the preferred systemic treatment for disseminated prostate cancer. Androgen action is exerted in target tissues via binding the androgen receptor (AR), a nuclear receptor transcription factor.Historically, the gene expression program mediated by the AR has been poorly understood. However, recent gene expression profiling and mor...

Based on a symposium covering latest research, this volume contains contributions by international experts. They investigate the role that viruses play in certain diseases, and include discussions of animal models and human trials. Some of the chapters cover specifically: streptococci and rheumatic heart disease, Epstein-Barr infection and cancer, and molecular mimicry and autoimmune disease.

This volume brings together recent developments in quasispecies theory extended to variable environments and practical applications in elucidating viral dynamics and treatment designs. In particular, the existence of an error threshold in rugged fitness landscapes has opened the way to a new antiviral strategy termed lethal mutagenesis, which is now under intensive theoretical, experimental and clinical investigation. As such the book explains how an understanding of quasispecies dynamics ...