The Road to Tolerance: Mechanism of Immune Homeostasis in Health and Disease

Dear Colleagues,

Our immune system has a unique mechanism for immune homeostasis and its activation or suppression would be depending on pathophysiological conditions. For the protection from invading microorganisms, innate and adaptive immunity should be activated for the clearance of microorganisms. Alternatively, our immune system should be tolerance to nonharmful antigens/pathogens such as autoantigens, food antigens and commensal bacteria. For the inhibition of tumor cell growth and metastasis, our immune system surveys abnormal cell development (i.e., immune surveillance), while aggressive tumor cells would induce immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment for tumor immune escape. On the other hand, the induction of graft acceptance (tolerance) is an ultimate goal in transplant immunology. The scope of the Special Issue is to summarize the current understanding of immune regulatory mechanisms for immune homeostasis in various research models such as infection, autoimmunity, tumor immunity, transplant immunity and fetomaternal tolerance.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Molecular mechanisms of self and non-self recognition;
• Molecular mechanisms of immune activation and tolerance induction;
• Molecular mechanisms of disease progression and its suppression;
• Biomarker discovery for prediction of immune status in health and disease;
• The development of therapeutic strategies for immune modulation.

Dr. Toshiaki Nakano
Guest Editor

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• The Road to Tolerance: Molecular Biomarkers for Prediction and Diagnosis of Post-transplant Complications in Liver Transplantation in International Journal of Molecular Sciences (1 article)