Inflammation | EPFL Graph Search

Inflammation (from inflammatio) is part of the complex biological response of body tissues to harmful stimuli, such as pathogens, damaged cells, or irritants, and is a protective response involving immune cells, blood vessels, and molecular mediators. The function of inflammation is to eliminate the initial cause of cell injury, clear out necrotic cells and tissues damaged from the original insult and the inflammatory process, and initiate tissue repair. The five cardinal signs are heat, pain, redness, swelling, and loss of function (Latin calor, dolor, rubor, tumor, and functio laesa). Inflammation is a generic response, and therefore it is considered as a mechanism of innate immunity, as compared to adaptive immunity, which is specific for each pathogen. Too little inflammation could lead to progressive tissue destruction by the harmful stimulus (e.g. bacteria) and compromise the survival of the organism. In contrast, too much inflammation, in the form of chronic inflammation, is as

Sutureless ocular surface reconstruction

Basile Salmon

Corneal diseases account for eight million blind people worldwide, making up to 10% of all causes of blindness. As 80% of the information is collected by our senses, blindness is a very invalidating condition which lowers greatly patients’ quality of life. Limbal stem cell deficiency describes all the conditions involving the failure of corneal epithelium and its progressive replacement by conjunctival epithelium and the opacification of the cornea, creating ultimately a loss of vision. Restoring transparency by reconstructing the ocular surface with a healthy corneal epithelium is the only long term treatment of this condition and has been a major challenge for regenerative medicine for the past twenty years. As the understanding of corneal epithelium renewal increases, the solutions offered to restore visual acuity are improving but the long term results of techniques used so far are still poor. We describe here an attempt to fix the issue of inflammation due to sutures in the case of transplantation of limbal epithelial cells carried by an amniotic membrane, by the use of an adhesive. LYDEX, our chemically defined bioadhesive uses food additives as building blocks for the formation of an hydrogel, which has been described to be perfectly bio-compatible. Results of this study confirm the absence of immunological reaction in the presence of our hydrogel but also bring to light its potentially insufficient permeability to glucose, which combined to mechanical trauma, leads to a dramatic failure of the grafted epithelium

2010

Identification and characterisation of small-molecule inhibitors targeting STING

Simone Margret Haag

The recognition of pathogen-derived nucleic acids is a critical mechanism by which the innate immune system detects viral infection. Upon activation, nucleic acid sensors initiate the expression of type I interferons and other inflammatory mediators, subsequently leading to potent antiviral immune responses. However, erroneous detection of nucleic acids can have deleterious consequences for the host by inducing the development of certain autoinflammatory disorders. Inappropriate sensing of self- nucleic acids underlies a spectrum of monogenic disease referred to as type interferonopathies, including the Aicardi-Goutières syndrome (AGS). These disorders are often driven by mutations in genes encoding for components of nucleic acid recognition pathways, thereby resulting in the constitutive activation of type I interferon responses. Insight into the molecular pathology of AGS has highlighted promising new targets that may be harnessed for the development of novel therapeutics to counter this disorder. Stimulator of interferon genes (STING) - a central adaptor of the cytosolic DNA sensing pathway - has been strongly implicated in the pathogenesis of distinct inflammatory disorders, including AGS. Therefore, pharmacological inhibition of STING presents a promising approach for the development of potent treatment strategies against these and potentially other STING-mediated, autoinflammatory diseases. Performing a cell-based small-molecule screen, we identified and characterized two series of compounds, which potently and selectively inhibit STING through a mechanism that blocks the activation-induced palmitoylation of STING. The identified small-molecules mediate this inhibition through covalent binding to a transmembrane predicted cysteine residue (Cys91) - a palmitoylation site required for STING activation. Using the inhibitors, we show that the palmitoylation of STING mediates the formation of multimeric complexes at the Golgi and the subsequent recruitment and activation of the direct downstream kinase TBK1. We also provide evidence that representatives of both identified compound classes potently inhibit STING-induced expression of inflammatory cytokines including type I interferon, in human and mouse cells. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that the identified STING inhibitors attenuate autoinflammatory disease features in a mouse model of AGS. Taken together, this work uncovers a small-molecule mediated mechanism to inhibit STING and demonstrates the pharmacological potential of targeting STING for the treatment of type I interferon driven disease such as AGS.

EPFL2019

Biophysical Regulation of Lymphatic Vessel Function

Dimana Miteva

Lymphatic capillaries collect interstitial fluid and dendritic cells from the periphery and deliver them to the lymph nodes for immune surveillance and tolerance maintenance. Upon injury and inflammation, lymphatic drainage can increase rapidly, and thus the lymphatic capillaries experience a broad range of fluid stresses and need to respond rapidly to such changes. Our understanding of their functional biology, adaptive ability and response to pathological changes in the biophysical environment is still very limited. This thesis focuses on how the lymphatic capillary endothelium senses and responds to changes of its biophysical environment with respect to its function, including fluid and cell transport, in the context of physiological and pathophysiological conditions. Using in vitro and in vivo models, we demonstrate that lymphatic endothelium is exquisitely sensitive to transmural flow, modulating both fluid and cell transport functions even in the absence of inflammatory cytokines. Flow increased lymphatic permeability and dendritic cell (DC) transmigration, which were coincident with changes in gene and protein expression of factor known to be involved in these, including chemoattractant chemokines, adhesion molecules and junctional proteins. These data provide the first evidence that lymphatic endothelium can regulate its transport functions in response to flow cues. They also show for the first time that transmural flow can, in the absence of inflammatory cues like TNF-a, drive expression of DC adhesion molecules like ICAM-1 and chemokines like CCL21 by lymphatic endothelium. Based on these findings we suggest that lymphatic flow is an important mediator of lymphatic function, particularly with respect to DC recruitment and trafficking to the lymph node. Furthermore, the response of the lymphatic endothelium to flow may be specific to the type of low, as lymphatic endothelial cells (LECs) might react differently to luminal shear flow, at physiological and pathophysiological levels, compared to transmural flow. To address this we used laminar shear stress chambers to expose only the apical surface of the lymphatic endothelial cells (LECs) to shear stress and demonstrated that lymphatic endothelium is indeed sensitive to luminal flow, fine-tuning its expression of adhesion molecules to modulate DC adhesion according to the shear stress. Specifically, at extremely low shear, adhesion was enhanced, unlike at higher shear, adhesion was downregulated. This is consistent with the notion that DC adhesion to LECs is only needed for entry but not transport in conducting vessels, since only the absorbing capillaries have low shear stresses. The interactions between DCs and LECs were strongly mediated by CCL21 and its receptor CCR7. These findings suggest that luminal shear stress acts as an active mechanosignal in LECs to potentially facilitate the traffic of immune cells inside of the lymphatic vessel to reach the lymph node and trigger an immune response. Additionally, we demonstrated that lymphatic vessels respond differentially to immunogenic and tolerogenic inflammatory stimulus. We used in vitro models to evaluate lymphatic uptake and lymphatic participation in dendritic cell transmigration in the presence of various inflammatory stimuli. We found that lymphatic endothelium exposed to TNF-a or complement activation were more conductive to dendritic cell transmigration, while LPS and TGF-β had opposite effect, affecting DCs to decrease DC transmigration. We further presented some insights in similarities in tumor and dendritic cells intravasation into inflamed lymphatic capillaries. These findings imply that lymphatic activation and participation in immune cells transport is not a universal phenomenon, but is strongly dependent on the nature of the inflammation. In conclusion, this work highlights the critical role of biophysical environment in lymphatic endothelial function, and how exquisitely sensitive the lymphatic capillaries are to their extracellular environment and how they use multiple cues to sense inflammation and danger, modulating their transport functions accordingly to regulate the delivery of antigens and immune cells to the lymph nodes.

EPFL2010