Advances in the treatment of lupus nephritis.

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune disease that leads to the formation and deposition of immune complexes throughout the body, which are pathogenic for the disease. Different forms of glomerulonephritis can occur in patients with SLE and can contribute significantly to the associated morbidity and, ultimately, mortality from the disease. Over the past two decades, there have been significant strides in our understanding of the disease and in treatments that attempt to control the formation and deposition of anti-DNA auto-antibodies and immune complexes, as well as the subsequent inflammatory cascade mediated through various cellular and humoral pathways leading to progressive renal damage and end-stage renal disease. In this chapter, we review the current understanding of the pathogenesis and treatment of lupus nephritis in its various stages and discuss the experimental and human data regarding some of the potential newer forms of therapy. We discuss data regarding the use of steroids, azathioprine, cyclophosphamide, cyclosporine A, mycophenolate mofetil, gammaglobulin, plasmapheresis, LJP 394, flaxseed oil, bindarit, anti-CD40 ligand, and CTLA4Ig.

Immunochemical determination of lonidamine in rat tissues and blood serum.

Lonidamine (LND) is an antitumor drug which interferes selectively with the energy metabolism of neoplastic cell. Because of its physico-chemical properties, LND determination with conventional methods, i.e. high performance liquid chromatography and spectrofluorimetry, gives rise to several problems: LND is a lipotropic drug which becomes intimately associated with biological membranes so that it is impossible to extract all the drug bound, thus leading to an underestimation of the LND content in cells and tissues. These difficulties can be overcome by the immunoenzymatic method described here. The assay is simple, rapid, practical, highly sensitive (2-5 ng/ml) and particularly suitable for the analysis of multiple samples (twelve samples in triplicate for each plate). There is, moreover, a great improvement in data reproducibility.