Why do acute respiratory infections in children remain a pressing problem? Current, prevention and treatment options

Literary data on peculiarities of immune system, anti-infectious immunity, including local protection of respiratory tract (lymphaticepithelial pharyngeal system), in children of early and preschool age, causing their higher incidence of acute respiratory infections (ARI) are given in the article. This age period is characterized by «physiological» humoral immune deficiency, reduced activation of the complement system, insufficient synthesis of cytokines, including interferons, T-cell immunosuppression, impaired intercellular cooperation, poor functional activity of natural killers and phagocytes. Despite the large range of means and methods of prophylaxis of infectious and inflammatory diseases of viral and bacterial etiology, it is necessary to search for new approaches taking into account the peculiarities of immune status in young children. The article presents the possibilities of controlling the system of congenital and adaptive immunity with medications, in particular, by using the bacterial lysate Broncho-munal®. The immunoregulatory role of bacterial lysates is presented in detail. The pathogenetic substantiation of the use of bacterial lysate Broncho-munal® for the prevention of acute respiratory infections in children, including children with recurrent respiratory infections is given.

Cancer and intercellular cooperation

The major transitions approach in evolutionary biology has shown that the intercellular cooperation that characterizes multicellular organisms would never have emerged without some kind of multilevel selection. Relying on this view, the Evolutionary Somatic view of cancer considers cancer as a breakdown of intercellular cooperation and as a loss of the balance between selection processes that take place at different levels of organization (particularly single cell and individual organism). This seems an elegant unifying framework for healthy organism, carcinogenesis, tumour proliferation, metastasis and other phenomena such as ageing. However, the gene-centric version of Darwinian evolution, which is often adopted in cancer research, runs into empirical problems: proto-tumoural and tumoural features in precancerous cells that would undergo ‘natural selection’ have proved hard to demonstrate; cells are radically context-dependent, and some stages of cancer are poorly related to genetic change. Recent perspectives propose that breakdown of intercellular cooperation could depend on ‘fields’ and other higher-level phenomena, and could be even mutations independent. Indeed, the field would be the context, allowing (or preventing) genetic mutations to undergo an intra-organism process analogous to natural selection. The complexities surrounding somatic evolution call for integration between multiple incomplete frameworks for interpreting intercellular cooperation and its pathologies.

Molecular and cellular basis of pathogenesis of tick-borne encephalitis

Main features of pathogenesis of tick-borne encephalitis virus’ persistense and outcome of the disease are determined by a complex xharacter of interaction between the virus and immune system of a patient. One of the main terms of pathogenetically im- portant virus activation is a low immune resistanse of an organism. The current article discusses role of modification of cellular dif- ferentiation, intercellular cooperation and cytogenetic instability of immunocytes as well as apoptosis as leading features of immu- nopathogenesis of tick-borne encephalitis.

The establishment of the embryonic-abembryonic axis in the mouse embryo

The influence of cell division order on the establishment of the embryonic-abembryonic axis (EA axis) of the mouse embryo was investigated. Aggregate embryos were constructed in which a labelled cell (or pair of cells) was combined with a group of unlabelled cells all of which were up to one cell cycle earlier or later in their progress through development to the blastocyst stage. The aggregates were cultured first to the nascent blastocyst stage and then to the expanded blastocyst stage. The positions of the progeny of the labelled cells in relation to the nascent blastocoel and to the orientation of the embryonic-abembryonic axis were recorded. It was concluded that cell division order does influence the establishment of the EA axis, early dividing cells tending to be associated with the nascent blastocoel and the site of the nascent blastocoel tending to mark the site of the abembryonic pole. However, the influence of division order was diminished by a requirement for intercellular cooperation during blastocoel formation and by a counteracting influence of division order arising from its effects on the allocation of cells to the inner cell mass.