Academic literature on the topic 'Immunology; Molecular dynamics'

The tremendous advances in the development of methods for the design and synthesis of peptides. pseudo-peptides and related compounds, as well as the corresponding advances in our understanding of peptide and protein structure, conformation, topography, and dynamics provides unique opportunities to apply designed synthetic peptides for an enormous variety of problems in chemistry, biology, and medicine. In addition, if these advances can be coupled to the advances in molecular biology and the human genome project, on the one hand, and asymmetric synthesis and catalysis, on the other, it should be possible to provide hitherto unavailable, indeed unthinkable, approaches to diverse areas of drug design, behavioral neuroscience, molecular immunology, chemotherapy, and a wide variety of other uses. Already it is clear that peptide therapy has enormous potential in such diverse areas as growth control, blood pressure management, neurotransmission, hormone action, satiety, addiction, pain, digestion, reproduction, and so forth. Nature has “discovered” that it can control nearly all biological processes by various kinds of molecular recognition, and that peptides and proteins are uniquely suited for this control because of their enormous potential for diversity and their unique physico-chemical properties. This finding may, perhaps, be most readily understood if one recognizes that, considering only the 20 normal eukaryotic amino acids, the number of unique chemical entities for a pentapeptide is 3,200,000 (205), for a hexapeptide it is 64,000,000 (206), and so on. Considered from this perspective, perhaps it is not unexpected that Nature has “discovered” that peptides and proteins can do it all, from providing structure and motion, to catalysis, to information transduction, to growth and maturation, and so on. The ability of the immune system in higher animals, including humans, to recognize literally millions of foreign materials made by Nature as well as humans, and to get rid of them as part of its survival strategy, is just one example that illustrates the potential of peptide-based drugs, therapeutics, and modulators of biological function. Despite the enormous potential of peptides and small proteins for these areas, surprisingly little advantage has been taken of the potential of these molecules as drugs and tools for use in basic and clinical research.

The field of tumour immunology has gradually reached a consensus that the immune system and tumours sustain a rich set of dynamic interactions starting early during carcinogenesis. Incipient tumours may be eliminated by the immune system via adaptive immune responses mediated mainly by cytotoxic CD8 T lymphocytes, which recognize short antigenic peptides presented by polymorphic major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules. Advanced tumours, however, are generally highly resistant to the main effectors of the immune system. Moreover, the molecular and cellular composition of the tumour microenvironment is strongly immunosuppressive. Recent research efforts have focused on the dissection of the mechanisms operating at the tumour sites, which neutralize antitumour immunity in both experimental models and directly in cancer patients. All along this basic research, translational scientists have tried to harness the immune system to design novel therapeutic modalities that have collectively been coined as cancer immunotherapy. The overall goal has been to increase the numbers of tumour antigen-specific T cells in cancer patients via either vaccination or adoptive transfer of large numbers of immune cells. It is safe to state that cancer immunotherapy will provide a revolution in the treatment of cancer and the future may bear the prospect of effective tumour control in many cancer types, and that immunotherapy will be one of the main components of effective therapeutic options.