Background: Understanding individual patient host-response to viruses is key to designing optimal personalized therapy. Unsurprisingly, in vivo human experimentation to understand individualized dynamic response of the transcriptome to viruses are rarely studied because of the obvious limitations stemming from ethical considerations of the clinical risk.
Objective: In this rhinovirus study, we first hypothesized that ex vivo human cells response to virus can serve as a proxy for otherwise controversial in vivo human experimentation.
Asthma increased dramatically in the last decades of the 20th century and is representative of chronic diseases that have been linked to altered microbial exposure and immune responses. Here we evaluate the effects of environmental exposures typically associated with asthma protection or risk on the microbial community structure of household dust (dogs, cats, and day care). PCR-denaturing gradient gel analysis (PCR-DGGE) demonstrated that the bacterial community structure in house dust is significantly impacted by the presence of dogs or cats in the home (P = 0.
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April 2003
Many uncertainties exist regarding the capability of cord blood mononuclear cells (CBMC) to produce cytokines. A number of conflicting reports led us to examine the effects of method of birth on CBMC production of interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma), interleukin-4 (IL-4) and interleukin-12 (IL-12). While constitutive production of IL-4 was found in both vaginally and cesarean-delivered infants, constitutive IFN-gamma or IL-12 production was found in neither.
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