Collectively, our findings highlight the important role of intracellular calcium mobilization in the activation of IL-8. These findings may be helpful for the clinical applications in the age-related macular degeneration (AMD) prevention and treatment.
BackgroundAnemia is common among end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients who undergone hemodialysis. The total reduction of red blood cell (RBC) count is associated with poor prognosis in these patients. Although erythropoietin (EPO) has been used as an effective treatment for ESRD patients with anemia, a large number of patients still present poor responses to EPO treatment.MethodsWe measured T-cell receptor sequencing profiles, including length of complementarity-deteremining region 3 (CDR3), intra- and inter-group (EPO resistant vs. responsive) clonotype diversity, V(D)J usage profiles and V-J combinations from ESRD patients and to investigate the correlation between these features and EPO treatment efficacy.ResultsOur results revealed statistical significance in the top 3 ~ 15 most abundant joint distributions of Vβ/Jβ among the two groups, suggesting the importance of V or J gene utilization in the EPO response of ESRD patients.ConclusionsIn summary, we provided evidence addressing the potential correlation between the immune repertoire and EPO response in ESRD patients.Trial registration
TMU-JIRB 201309026. Registered 16 October 2013.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12929-017-0349-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Dear Editor, Primary mucosal melanoma is a rare subtype of melanoma that carries poor prognosis. Traditional treatment options of mucosal melanoma are surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy; but the overall survival remains low. 1 Cytotoxic T-lymphocyte associated protein 4 (CLTA-4) and programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1), both inhibitory immune checkpoints commonly seen on activated T cells, have been found to be promising targets for treatment of advanced cancers. 2 However, the efficacy and response to immunotherapy in mucosal melanoma remains unknown. Herein, we report a case involving a patient, who was a 70-year-old male and referred to Taipei Medical University Hospital with confirmed diagnosis of mucosa melanoma over hard plate of mouth. The patient was admitted and subjected to anti-PD-1 immunotherapy (pembrolizumab 200 mg every 3 weeks) (Figure 1A). Serial imaging of primary malignant melanoma of the hard palate showed that the tumor size gradually decreased after treatment with pembrolizumab, suggesting partial response/stable disease secondary to continuous immunotherapy (Figure 1B). However, after seventh cycle of treatment, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed enlarged previous known metastatic lesions and new tumor nodules in brain (Figure 1B). The patient received stereotactic radiation therapy before treatment cycle 14 (Figure 1A). Although the primary metastatic brain lesions were smaller and stationary after radiotherapy, the following brain MRI displayed several hyperdensity masses in the right frontal lobe with perifocal edema and mild mass effect (Figure 1B). Subsequently, patient suffered from infection and respiratory distress and died 2 months after 17 th cycle of pembrolizumab therapy. To monitor changes in patient's circulating T-cell repertoire at each cycle of immunotherapy, high-throughput TCRβ sequencing of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), isolated from the patient's peripheral blood, was performed using a rapid amplification of 5′ complemen-This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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