The efficacy of stereoimage optical topometry to evaluate depressed acne scar treatment using cultured autologous fibroblast injection.

Background: Despite the use of several evaluation methods, the lack of a true consensus scale hinders standardization of evaluation and treatment of depressed acne scars.

Objective: To investigate the usefulness of a stereoimage optical topometer (SOT) system in evaluating the efficacy of autologous cultured fibroblast injection for depressed acne scars and to compare the results with those obtained using a visual grading system.

Materials And Methods: Twenty-two patients with depressed acne scars were included.

Attenuated expression of interferon-induced protein kinase PKR in a simian cell devoid of type I interferons.

The interferon-induced, double-stranded RNA (dsRNA)-dependent protein kinase PKR plays a key role in interferon-mediated host defense against viral infection, and is implicated in cellular transformation and apoptosis. We have isolated a cDNA of simian PKR encoding a product with 83% amino acid identity to the human homolog and showed that PKR expression is significantly attenuated in the Vero E6 African green monkey kidney cells devoid of type I interferon genes. A variant form of PKR lacking the exon 12 in the kinase domain is produced in these cells, presumably from an alternatively spliced transcript.