Disease: correlates of protection, determinants of outcome and clinical management' amended to incorporate urgent COVID-19 studies and contract number 75F40120C00085 'Characterization of severe coronavirus infection in humans and model systems for medical countermeasure development and evaluation' awarded to

The liver is an immunoregulatory organ in which a tolerogenic microenvironment mitigates the relative "strength" of local immune responses. Paradoxically, necro-inflammatory diseases create the need for most liver transplants. Treatment of hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus, and acute T cell-mediated rejection have redirected focus on long-term allograft structural integrity. Understanding of insults should enable decades of morbidity-free survival after liver replacement because of these tolerogenic properties. Studies of long-term survivors show low-grade chronic inflammatory, fibrotic, and microvascular lesions, likely related to some combination of environment insults (i.e. abnormal physiology), donor-specific antibodies, and T cell-mediated immunity. The resultant conundrum is familiar in transplantation: adequate immunosuppression produces chronic toxicities, while lightened immunosuppression leads to sensitization, immunological injury, and structural deterioration. The "balance" is more favorable for liver than other solid organ allografts. This occurs because of unique hepatic immune physiology and provides unintended benefits for allografts by modulating various afferent and efferent limbs of allogenic immune responses. This review is intended to provide a better understanding of liver immune microanatomy and physiology and thereby (a) the potential structural consequences of low-level, including allo-antibody-mediated injury; and (b) how liver allografts modulate immune reactions. Special attention is given to the microvasculature and hepatic mononuclear phagocytic system.

Bone metastasis is the major cause of death in breast cancer. The lack of effective treatment suggests that disease mechanisms are still largely unknown. As a key component of the tumor microenvironment, macrophages promote tumor progression and metastasis. In this study, we found that macrophages are abundant in human and mouse breast cancer bone metastases. Macrophage ablation significantly inhibited bone metastasis growth. Lineage tracking experiments indicated that these macrophages largely derive from Ly6C+CCR2+ inflammatory monocytes. Ablation of the chemokine receptor, CCR2, significantly inhibited bone metastasis outgrowth and prolonged survival. Immunophenotyping identified that bone metastasis–associated macrophages express high levels of CD204 and IL4R. Furthermore, monocyte/macrophage-restricted IL4R ablation significantly inhibited bone metastasis growth, and IL4R null mutant monocytes failed to promote bone metastasis outgrowth. Together, this study identified a subset of monocyte-derived macrophages that promote breast cancer bone metastasis in an IL4R-dependent manner. This suggests that IL4R and macrophage inhibition can have potential therapeutic benefit against breast cancer bone disease.

The mechanisms by which the hepatitis B x protein (HBx) contributes to hepatocarcinogenesis remain unclear. However, interaction with the tumor suppressor gene p53 and inhibition of p53-dependent cellular functions, including nucleotide excision repair, could be central to this process. We studied the levels of global repair (removal of cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPDs) and 6-4 photoproducts) and transcription-coupled repair (removal of CPDs in both strands of the dihydrofolate reductase gene) in primary wild-type and p53-null mouse hepatocytes. We show that global repair of CPDs appears to be more efficient in mouse hepatocytes than in other commonly studied rodent cells and approaches the levels of human cells and that p53 is required for global genomic DNA repair of CPDs but not for transcription-coupled repair. We then investigated the effect of HBx expression on hepatocyte nucleotide excision repair. We demonstrate that HBx expression affects DNA repair in a p53-dependent manner. Transient HBx expression reduces global DNA repair in wild-type cells to the level of p53-null hepatocytes and has no effect on the repair of a transfected damaged plasmid. Therefore, in viral hepatitis, the hepatitis B virus could inhibit the p53-dependent component of global repair leading, over time, to accumulation of genetic defects and fostering carcinogenesis.There is compelling epidemiological evidence that chronic hepatitis associated with hepatitis B virus (HBV) 1 infection is a major risk factor for the development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Among the four viral proteins produced, the small protein hepatitis B x (HBx) is thought to be important in causing HCC, although the mechanism of its involvement has not been defined clearly. Some strains of mice carrying HBx as a transgene show a direct correlation between the level of HBx expression and the likelihood to develop HCC (1, 2). In others, HBx expression increases susceptibility to the development of HCC after exposure to the liver carcinogen diethylnitrosamine (3,4). A number of mechanisms have been proposed to explain the role of HBx in hepatocarcinogenesis. HBx stimulates the transcription of many genes (for review, see Ref. 5), including transcription factors and oncogenes, and interacts with many cellular proteins (for review, see Ref. 6). One important target of HBx believed to be related to promotion of carcinogenesis is the p53 tumor suppressor protein. Several lines of evidence suggest that functional inactivation of p53 without mutation can occur in preneoplastic liver and that, in these circumstances, p53 mutation and allele loss are later events (7-11), occurring after carcinogenesis and mediating tumor progression. Indeed, accumulation of wild-type p53 has been observed in hepatocytes of patients with cirrhosis and liver cell dysplasia, both associated with high risk for HCC development, particularly in patients infected with HBV (10,[12][13][14]. Observations both in vitro and in vivo (15, 16) and in HBx-transgenic mice (17) have suggested that...