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

在这些研究中，我们研究了CTGF，即与TGF-β的相互作用在TGF-β诱导的新生小鼠皮肤纤维化模型中的作用。TGF-β单独诱导的纤维化在3天后峰值消失，而当CTGF同时或连续注射时，TGF-β与CTGF联合可诱导不可逆纤维化。上述观察结果有力地支持了我们的假设，即TGF-β诱导皮肤纤维化，而CTGF维持这种纤维化。此外，我们尝试使用抗CTGF中和抗体阻断这种纤维化，我们符合部分抑制。我们将筛选更有效的中和抗体和反义DNA。我们使用增加的病例测量了系统性硬化症患者血清CTGF水平，我们发现患者血清CTGF水平升高，且CTGF水平与皮肤硬化症和肺纤维化的严重程度有统计学相关性。因此，我们发现CTGF与系统性硬化症有很强的相关性，系统性硬化症是一种代表性的纤维化疾病。在未来，我们将利用TGF-β和CTGF建立的皮肤硬化小鼠模型来筛选抗硬皮病药物。

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.