Cytokine system

Abstract

Cytokines can be marked out as a new separate regulatory system which, along with nervous and endocrine systems, helps to maintain homeostasis, and these three systems are tightly interconnected and interdependent. Cytokines are the most universal regulatory system, because they can possess both distant biological action after secretion by cell-producer (locally and systemically), and action by intercellular contact as membrane-bound biologically active form. Cytokines include interferons, interleukins, growth and colony-stimulating factors, chemokines, mediators from tumor necrosis factor group, transforming growth factors and some other molecules. Cytokines are not primary mediators of pathology. However cytokines can participate in immunopathologic processes formation and function as diagnostic markers in some diseases. On the other hand the promising perspective of cytokine clinical usage for treatment of widespread diseases, including infectious and cancer, always was the driving force for cytokine study.