Susanne Gabrielsson, Eva Buentke, Agne Liedén, Margit Schmidt, Mauro D'Amato, Maria Tengvall-Linder, Annika Scheynius
DOI: 10.1080/00015550410026957

It is known that 28-84% of patients with atopic dermatitis exhibit IgE and/or T-cell reactivity to the opportunistic yeast Malassezia sympodialis ,which can be taken up by immature monocyte-derived dendritic cells(MDDCs), resulting in MDDC maturation. The aim of this study was toinvestigate whether MDDCs from patients with atopic dermatitis responddifferently to M. sympodialis compared to MDDCs from healthy individuals. Immature MDDCs were stimulated with M. sympodialis and the gene expression profiles were analysed with cDNA arrays containing 406 genes. Our results show that M. sympodialis differently affected MDDCs from patients with atopic dermatitis, andmore so in severely ill patients, compared with healthy individuals.Six genes were more than fivefold up-regulated in MDDCs from more thanone patient with atopic dermatitis, coding for CD54, CD83, IL-8,monocyte-derived chemokine (MDC), BTG1 and IL-1R antagonist. In healthyindividuals this was true only for BTG1. Up-regulations of IL-8 and MDCwere confirmed at the protein level. Our findings might reflect anincreased trafficking and stimulatory capacity in MDDCs from thepatients, which is likely to result in a stronger inflammatory responseto M. sympodialis .