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Assays for cytokines and cytokine assay performance 1

Part 1 of 2
Published on January 31, 2022   41 min

A selection of talks on Immunology

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Hi, I am Theresa Whiteside. I'm a professor of pathology at the University of Pittsburgh and I work at the Hillman Cancer Center. I will be talking to you today about assays for cytokines and the performance of this assay that gives us rational, good data.
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Cytokines and chemokines play a critical role in the pathogenesis of human diseases. Cytokines and chemokines are similar in many characteristics, such as their small size, which varies between 5 and 20 kDa, and they are slightly different in structure, but they perform different functions. While cytokines mediate immune responses and are involved in inflammation, chemokines regulate the migration of cells and their chemotaxis, their accumulations in various tissues. The levels of cytokines and chemokines change under pathologic conditions and the availability of biologically relevant and reliable methods for their assessment in human body fluids and tissues is critically important and clinically important. There are many different known cytokines. I think we know about 50 of them, and there is clearly a division of labor among the cytokines and that requires methods for defining cytokine profiles and cytokine networks. Cytokines tend to work like networks, meaning that one cytokine induces the appearance of other cytokines. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to talk a little bit about a CD4 positive T cell development. CD4 positive helper T cells have many different subsets, so they are Th1 and Th2 cells, Th9, and Th17 regulatory helper T cells, as well as follicular helper T cells. Each set of these CD4 positive T cells, is characterized by a different set of cytokines they produce, and by the presence of master transcription factors that define this subset. The transcription factors are listed underneath each of these sets here and the cytokines or set of cytokines each set produces are listed on the right-hand side. For example, you can see that the Th1 set which mediates, which is pro-inflammatory subsets produces interferon gamma IL-12 while Th2 subsets produce Ion2, Ion4, and lon13, et cetera. This is important because these sets or networks of cytokines, these subsets determine their role and regulate their functions.

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