Role of connective tissue growth factor (CTGF) in association with systemic sclerosis

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In these studies, we investigated the role of CTGF, namely inter action with TGF-β in TGF-β induced skin fibrosis model of newborn mice.TGF-β solely induced fibrosis disappears with 3 day peak, although when CTGF was injected simultaneously or consecutively, combination of TGF-β and CTGF induces irreversible fibrosis.Above observations strongly support our hypothesis that TGF-β induces skin fibrosis and CTGF acts to maintain this fibrosis. In addition, we tried to block this fibrosis using anti- CTGF neutralizing antibody, we conformed partial suppression. We are going to screen more potent neutralizing antibody and antisense of DNA.We measured serum CTGF levels of systemic sclerosis using increased cases, we found elevated levels of CTGF the patients and the levels of CTGF was statistically correlated with severity of skin sclerosis and pulmonary fibrosis. Thus, we found strong correlation between CTGF and systemic sclerosis, which is a representative fibrotic disorder.In the future, we use our skin sclerosis mice model by TGF-β and CTGF to screen anti-scleroderma drugs.