Immunoengineering: a credible mechanism for CAMPATH-1H action in bone marrow and organ transplantation and the implications for treatment of the immune dysfunction AIDS.

Immunoengineering is a term coined to represent the mostly future ability to use or target the immune system's natural components, with emphasis on the regulatory components, to up or down regulate the immune system's attack against specific proteins associated with an unwanted pathology or immune occurrence. It will constitute manipulating parts of the immune system, mostly those specific for the disease associated antigen(s) and generally of a regulatory nature, in various immunological locale or the whole body compartment, to achieve a disease free state for the patient. The number of practical applications awaiting the mastery of immune components as regulatory therapeutics is enormous and immunoengineering should provide treatments in a wide range of disease categories. HIV is a disease where this discipline could provide a quick cure, even eradication of the virus. A potential cheap solution to HIV infection, based on using immunoengineering and adaptable to the infrastructure problems of the Third World is highlighted in the following because of the health emergency that exists in the Third World.

An editorial for the HIV infected: immune regulation. The implications for treatment of HIV infection and the potential role of T cell suppressor pathways instead of apopstasis, anergy or direct CD4 T cell deletion in AIDS pathogenesis.

The AIDS crises makes for an interesting study of the interactions of activists, researchers, caregivers, the press, politicians and other groups in society. In the popular press and elsewhere there has been a growing movement since the inception of the disease to place efforts against AIDS as the highest standard of our benevolence, proficiency and determination when confronting a disease. Because of the potential benefit in understanding the interactions of groups and how research progressed and failed during the AIDS crises, differing perspectives should be recorded on this matter. The person currently in most need of an objective viewpoint on AIDS research, including an outlook on the past, as well as the present and future, is the person who is infected with HIV. While many of the AIDS related bureaucracies, scientists and celebrities have achieved consecration in the fight against HIV, a question arises whether this praise is deserved and really due to their keeping the AIDS patient as the first matter of the heart and mind; or whether they have merely achieved what bureaucracies and celebrity are best at, making society and those they should serve, think that they cannot do with out them.The following editorial chronicles a scandalous intellectual failure of immunologists in the fight against HIV. It delineates potential areas of concern for the HIV infected patient in the present and future, which may be important directions in the fight against HIV, both for treatment to evolve to the ideal and for an economically viable treatment for the Third World.

The beneficial effect of donor-specific transfusions: a review of existing explanations and a new hypothesis based on a relatively unapplied theory of T cell immunoregulation. A regulatory hypothesis in progress...

The mechanism by which donor specific transfusions protect a graft from the recipient's immune system is unknown. It is likely that this beneficial mechanism is a subset or distinct exhibition of the general rules governing the regulation of the immune system. This phenomenon provides a strong framework for investigation of immune regulation, considering its potential consanguinity to immune regulation, that it is a paradox representing a manifestation of regulatory rules, and that it provides a wealth of clinical experience and experimentation from which to make inferences. Vital in any exploration of immune regulation, is the promise held in reducing the immune system to its chief elemental regulatory mechanisms and interactions. Strangely, the majority of this consequential work may have already been accomplished by Gershon, Green and colleagues with their elegant demarcation of T cell regulation into suppressor and contrasuppressor pathways. The practical and theoretical implications of this discovery seem to be, for the most part, ignored by mainstream immunology. It is doubtful, based on the quality and quantity of their work, or confirming work by other laboratories that they were inaccurate in their findings. It remains a horrible waste that their discoveries are not in immunology's pantheon of hallowed discoveries and are little used. With all this kept in mind, a comprehensive hypothesis of regulation was put together based mainly on Gershon's portrait of the suppressor and contrasuppressor pathways' contributions to immune regulation and experimentation surrounding the unsolved paradox of donor specific transfusions.