Is conditioned pain modulation (CPM) affected by negative emotional state?

Background: Conditioned pain modulation (CPM) is an experimental paradigm, which describes the inhibition of responses to a noxious or strong-innocuous stimulus, the test stimulus (TS), by the additional application of a second noxious or strong-innocuous stimulus, the conditioning stimulus (CS). As inadequate CPM efficiency has been assumed to be predisposing for clinical pain, the search for moderating factors explaining inter-individual variations in CPM is ongoing. Psychological factors have received credits in this context.

Protective T cell receptor identification for orthotopic reprogramming of immunity in refractory virus infections.

Viral infections cause life-threatening disease in immunocompromised patients and especially following transplantation. T cell receptor (TCR) engineering redirects specificity and can bring significant progress to emerging adoptive T cell transfer (ACT) approaches. T cell epitopes are well described, although knowledge is limited on which TCRs mediate protective immunity.

CRISPR-Cas9-Mediated Glucocorticoid Resistance in Virus-Specific T Cells for Adoptive T Cell Therapy Posttransplantation.

Immunosuppression posttransplantation exposes patients to an increased risk for refractory viral infections as an important cause of morbidity and mortality. Protective T cell immunity can be restored by adoptive T cell transfer, but ongoing immunosuppression limits efficacy of T cell responses. In order to deliver protection against viral pathogens and allow at the same time necessary steroid therapy, we generated glucocorticoid-resistant T cells by CRISPR-Cas9-mediated knockout of the glucocorticoid receptor in primary human virus-specific T cell products.