KIR/HLA ligands immunogenetics markers associated with outcome of hepatitis B virus infection in the Bulgarian population.

Background: Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is one of the most common infections worldwide, having negative impact on world health due to the tendency for chronification with late complications such as liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Natural killer (NK) cells as part of innate antiviral defense influence the clinical course of HBV infection: elimination of the virus or chronic disease.

Aim: Therefore, we investigated the polymorphisms of the main gene systems, regulating NK-cell function: killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIRs) and their appropriate HLA class I ligands in 144 HBV infected patients (124 chronic carriers and 20 spontaneously recoved) and 126 ethnically matched healthy controls from the Bulgarian population in a case-control study.

Rare diagnosis of fibrous cardiac diverticulum in an adult followed by urgent surgical intervention.

We describe the case of a 59-year old male patient with an acute onset of chest pain who was admitted to our unit with a suspected rupture of the left ventricle pseudoaneurysm, compressing the left atrium and the ascending aorta. Our urgent surgical intervention caused us to reject our initial diagnosis and revealed a cardiac diverticulum arising from the left ventricle outflow tract, spreading to the sub-valvular area compressing the left atrium, the ascending aorta and the pulmonary trunk, and compromising the aortic and mitral valve, causing moderate regurgitation. We removed the defect and replaced the aortic valve, eliminating the compression of the left atrium, aorta and pulmonary trunk.

Emergency surgical intervention after unsuccessful percutaneous transluminal angioplasty and stenting of aortic coarctation.

Coarctation of thoracic aorta is an uncommon diagnosis in adults. Catheter-based intervention consisting of primary ballooning and stenting is becoming one of the methods of choice for the treatment of native coarctation. We describe the case of a young adult with coarctation of the aorta treated unsuccessfully with percutaneous transluminal angioplasty and stent implantation that resulted in stent migration into the aortic arch and led to an urgent operative intervention.

T cell epitope definition by differential mass spectrometry: identification of a novel, immunogenic HLA-B8 ligand directly from renal cancer tissue.

In this study, we describe a differential mass spectrometric technique for the immuno-proteomic analysis of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) peptides of a renal cell carcinoma (RCC) biopsy compared with the healthy kidney tissue of the same patient after nephrectomy. Using a stable isotope labeling approach, we could directly compare and relatively quantify 43 MHC-peptide pairs, most of which were present in similar proportions on both normal kidney and tumor. Significantly, two dominant peptides of monoisotopic masses ([M+H](+)) 973.