ABSTRACT
The acute phase response represents one of the organism’s first line of defense following inflammatory stimuli. This response, unlike the immune response, is nonspecific in nature and is characterized by changes in a wide variety of systemic and metabolic processes, including alterations in the plasma concentrations of a group of proteins of hepatic origin referred to as the acute phase proteins. The initial event in cytokine-mediated signal transduction cascades involves interaction of the cytokine with specific cell-surface receptors. Signaling mechanisms that occur downstream of the receptor are poorly understood. It is now clearly evident that regulation of a given biological function, especially more complicated processes such as cell proliferation or differentiation, involves activation of a complex network consisting of interactions between diverse signal transduction pathways, which ultimately converge at some distal step downstream in the signal transduction cascade.
