The burden of moderate to severe psoriasis: an overview.

Psoriasis is a chronic, immune-mediated skin disorder that affects 1-3% of the general population worldwide. While considered a non-life-threatening disease, psoriasis represents a social and financial burden for patients and the healthcare system. Individuals suffer from disfigurement and from social stigmatization.

Emerging drugs for psoriasis.

Background: Psoriasis is a relatively common, chronic and disabling skin disease, due to a disturbed proliferation and differentiation of keratinocytes, accompanied by vascular alterations and infiltration of inflammatory cells with a local T(H)1-type cytokine immune response. There is no cure, but several treatment options are available.

Objective: The treatment of psoriasis is far from being satisfactory, due to the impractical modalities of topical treatment and the suboptimal safety profile of the systemic treatments available.

The TFG protein, involved in oncogenic rearrangements, interacts with TANK and NEMO, two proteins involved in the NF-kappaB pathway.

TRK-fused gene (TFG) was first identified as a partner of NTRK1 in generating the thyroid TRK-T3 oncogene, and is also involved in oncogenic rearrangements with ALK in anaplastic lymphoma and NOR1 in mixoid chondrosarcoma. The TFG physiological role is still unknown, but the presence of a number of motifs involved in protein interactions suggests that it may function by associating with other proteins. We have recently demonstrated that TFG associates and regulates the activity of the tyrosine phosphatase SHP-1.

Analysis of SHP-1-mediated down-regulation of the TRK-T3 oncoprotein identifies Trk-fused gene (TFG) as a novel SHP-1-interacting protein.

SHP-1 is a cytoplasmic SH2 domain containing protein-tyrosine phosphatase (PTP) involved in the negative regulation of multiple signaling pathways in hematopoietic, nervous, and epithelial cells. The thyroid TRK-T3 oncogene consists of the NTRK1 tyrosine kinase domain fused in-frame with sequences of the TFG (TRK-fused gene), encoding a protein of unknown function. TFG contains a coiled-coil domain responsible for TRK-T3 oligomerization.