In February of 2012, an International Forum entitled Frontiers in Immunology and Organ Transplantation was held in Shanghai, China. In attendance were 200 physicians and scientists from China, USA and the European Union. The conference, organized by Song Guo Zheng at University of Southern California, co-organized by Xin-Xiao Zheng at University of Pittsburg, and Huimin Fan at Tongji University, featured recent developments in the field of immune regulation and tolerance. The main and key findings reported at the meeting are summarized here.
The conference began with a keynote speech during which Xuetao Cao, an eminent Immunologist and President of Chinese Medicine Academy of Science, presented his studies focusing on the role of innate immune responses in immune tolerance. His group has independently identified and functionally characterized >20 molecules from human dendritic cell (DC). His group also identified a new regulatory DC subset and found that the splenic stroma could drive mature DC to differentiate into regulatory DC.
He reported his new results about the investigation of mechanisms for immune recognition and Toll-like receptors (TLRs) signaling. Just like ‘Yin’ and ‘Yang’ in the balance of TLR response, his group demonstrated membrane MHC class I molecules and intracellular MHC class II molecules as the negative and positive regulators of TLR response, in contrast to the promotion of TLR-triggered innate inflammatory response by intracellular MHC II molecules which are mainly inducibly expressed in antigen-presenting cells.