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Balancing the immune system: Th1 and Th2

W van Eden¹, R van der Zee¹, P van Kooten¹, S E Berlo¹, P M Cobelens², A Kavelaars², C J Heijnen², B Prakken², S Roord³, S Albani³

¹ Division of Immunology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
² University Medical Centre Utrecht, "Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital", Department of Paediatric Immunology, Utrecht, Netherlands
³ Center for Pediatric Rheumatology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr W van Eden, Division of Immunology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University, Yalelaan 1, 3584CL Utrecht, Netherlands;
w.eden@vet.uu.nl

Keywords: T cells; immunology

Abbreviations: hsp, heat shock protein; TLR, Toll-like receptor

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

CD4+ T cells are subdivided into Th1 and Th2 cells. Their relative presence or activation is thought to have a regulatory effect on immune behaviour. Until recently, the relative suppression of Th1 cells by the relative increase of Th2 activities, was thought to be a main mechanism of keeping or restoring the balance in a diseased immune system. Nowadays, however, a specialised subset of regulatory T cells is held to be responsible for the main effects of securing a balanced immune system. It is possible that heat shock proteins (hsps) are relevant antigens driving such regulation.

Heat shock proteins are known to be immunodominant antigens of bacteria. They are evolutionarily strongly conserved proteins present in all eukaryotic and prokaryotic cellular organisms and are upregulated by several forms of stress. Despite (the paradigm of) self tolerance, hsp-epitopes homologous to endogenous host hsp sequences have been implicated as T cell epitopes to . . . [Full text of this article]

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