Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a viral infection which can cause a variety of respiratory, gastrointestinal, and vascular symptoms. The acute illness phase generally lasts no more than 2-3 weeks. However, there is increasing evidence that a proportion of COVID-19 patients experience a prolonged convalescence and continue to have symptoms lasting several months after the initial infection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present a patient with new-onset erythema nodosum leprosum months after successful treatment of her mid-borderline leprosy, which was likely triggered by a combination of antecedent influenza vaccination and upper respiratory tract infection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFis an important pathogen that can cause severe illness and mortality in immunocompromised patients. We highlight here the case of a 53-year-old man presenting to hospital 4 years postliver transplant with fever, acute renal failure and a medial thigh lesion. Initially treated as bacterial sepsis, the patient failed to improve on broad-spectrum antibiotics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCrystal structures of antigenic peptides bound to class I MHC proteins suggest that chemical modifications of the central part of the bound peptide should not alter binding affinity to the MHC restriction protein but could perturb the T-cell response to the parent epitope. In our effort in designing nonpeptidic high-affinity ligands for class I MHC proteins, oligomers of (R)-3-hydroxybutanoate and(or) beta-homoalanine have been substituted for the central part of a HLA-B27-restricted T-cell epitope of viral origin. The affinity of six modified peptides to the B2705 allele was determined by an in vitro stabilization assay.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFX-ray studies as well as structure-activity relationships indicate that the central part of class I MHC-binding nonapeptides represents the main interaction site for a T cell receptor. In order to rationally manipulate T cell epitopes, several nonpeptidic spacer have been designed from the X-ray structure of a MHC-peptide complex and substituted for the T cell receptor-binding part of several antigenic peptides. The binding of the modified epitopes to the HLA-B*2705 protein was studied by an in vitro stabilisation assay and the thermal stability of all complexes examined by circular dichroism spectroscopy.
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