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Inflammation is a defense reaction caused by tissue damage or injury. The primary objective of inflammation is to localize and eradicate the irritant and repair the surrounding tissue. For the survival of the host, inflammation is a necessary and beneficial process. However when this process becomes chronic, inflammation may lead to severe disorders. The ultimate goal of inflammation research is to develop methods to control inflammation by modulating or blocking leukocyte adhesion to the endothelium.
The innate immune system also initiates local and sometimes systemic inflammatory responses that alert the body to the presence of potential threats and guides the development of subsequent adaptive immune responses that evolve in the weeks following infection. The inflammatory process is a double-edged sword; while on one hand inflammation is usually helpful and protective, it sometimes can become deregulated and result in tissue destruction and physiological changes that endanger the health of a person. Septic shock, a life-threatening systemic inflammatory response to bacterial infection, is a major problem in hospitals around the world, and inflammatory processes cause damage in a broad range of diseases including atherosclerosis, arthritis, and cancer.
These ideas developed by basic research contribute to contemporary research projects developing anti-inflammatory drugs and immunomodulators as a whole range of therapeutic tools to fight inflammatory and infectious diseases, cancer, allergies and autoimmune disorders. These agents function as blockers, suppressors, or modulators of the inflammatory response. Among them, some target specific molecules named cytokines correspond to a wide family of proteins that include interferons, interleukins, TNF and certain growth factors. In turn, these cytokines induce the expression of a large number of genes that participate to the host defense. Therefore, the global expression profile of these target genes may reflect more significantly the specificities of a pathologic state or the efficiency of a treatment than the quantification of the cytokines themselves.
Several decades of investigation have revealed thousand of genes and proteins that play important role in the interplay between the immune system and pathogenic organisms. With the high-throuhput technology from GenSodi, CIGsearch™ Gene Arrays, for studying gene expression, a further point was crossed to analyse how many pathways interact with each other to coordinate our defense. More importantly, we study the passage between innate and aptative immunity orchestrated by mediators of inflammation by interferons family members.
By combining GENSODI gene arrays technology to functional networking analysis in PredictSearch, we were able to decipher general and specific pathways that interplay to allow a complex inflammatory response to occur. | 
