ABSTRACT
Autoimmune diseases (rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, inflammatory bowel disease, etc.) are diseases characterized by local or systemic abnormal inflammatory immune response. At present, the treatment drugs of autoimmune diseases mainly include nonsteroid anti-inflammatory drugs, steroid anti-inflammatory drugs and disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (chemical medicine, natural medicine and biological agents), etc. With the pathological mechanism of autoimmune diseases to be clarified deeply and the discovery of new drug targets, new biological agents targeting cytokines and cell surface molecules have been developed rapidly. In recent years, multiple small molecule drugs targeting Janus kinase/ signal transducers and activators of transcription signaling pathway have been developed and applied in clinic. Soft regulation of inflammatory immune response drugs are the drugs with anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory effects, as well as less adverse reactions. To develop this type of drug will be a new strategy and one of the main directions for the treatment of autoimmune diseases. The research progress of medicines to treat autoimmune diseases has been reviewed in this paper.
ABSTRACT
Inflammation reaction and immune response are inseparable at the levels of system, tissue, cell and molecule. Inflammatory immune responses (IIR) is defined a moderate or abnormal system responses of inflammatory immune related cells in responding to the internal and external environ-ment changes of body. Inflammatory immune related cells (traditionally, eg, macrophages, dendritic cells, T cells and B cells, etc, and non- traditionally, eg, glial cells, endothelial cells, epithelial cells, fibroblasts, synovial cells and liver cells, etc), and cytokines/receptor signal transduction involved in IIR. In current clinic drugs, such as inhibitors of COXs, inhibitors of TNF-alpha, IL-6, IL-17, BAFF etc, tradi?tional immunosuppressive drugs (eg, methotrexate, leflunomide) and novel kinase inhibitor (eg, JAKs inhibitor), suppress enzyme activity, gene synthesis and transcription, cytokines and receptor signal, etc, respectively. These drugs restrain the excessive activation function of inflammatory immune related cells, but at the same time, also inhibit the physiological response of these cells to signaling molecules, which cause physiological function disorder of cells and tissues, increase the risks of serious adverse drug reaction including infection and cancer. Soft regulation of inflammatory immune responses (SRIIR), that is regulating the activity of key molecules or interaction between molecules in cells and resulting in making excessive activation function back to normal physiological levels, is a novel direction of discovery and development of new drugs for the treatment of IIR related diseases.