The outline of COE program at University of Toyama entitled “Advanced Approach to Personalized Medicine Based on Oriental Philosophy” was presented. This program consists of two parts, i.e., basic research group and clinical research group. On the basic researches, we performed field work for natural resources of medicinal plants both in Mongolia and China. And we revealed the differences of the chemical ingredients in rhubarb family. Furthermore, we developped a new DNA microarray to detect the panax ginseng family. In this paper, we also reported that the chemical ingredients of medicinal herbs convert new substances by the action of intestinal bacterias. In the clinical research group, we revealed that the characteristic protein pattern of “blood stagnant (Oketsu) syndrome” in Kampo medicine by means of protein chip array system. We showed the result of the midway evaluation by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Universities ; basic research ; seconds ; Chemical compound, NOS ; Proteins

Intradermal gene administration was found to induce a more profound immune response than direct intramusclular gene injection. We performed intradermal vaccination of B10.PL mice with DNA encoding for the V 8.2 region of the T-cell receptors (TCR). Three weeks later, these mice were immunized with rat myelin basic protein (MBP). Daily mean clinical scores and mortality rate were lower in this group compared with controls. The proliferative responses of lymph node cells to rat MBP were slightly less in the vaccination groups than in the control groups (p<0.05). However, we detected no differences between the two groups with regard to the production of MBP-specific IgG, IgG1, & IgG2a antibodies. The levels of cytokine mRNA expression in the vaccination groups were observed higher than in the control groups without antigen-specific stimulation, but all of cytokine expressions between the vaccination and control groups after antigen-specific stimulation were identical. These results demonstrate that intradermal DNA vaccines encoding for TCR might prove to be useful in the control of autoimmune disease.
Animals ; Autoantibodies/blood ; Base Sequence ; Cytokines/genetics ; DNA, Complementary/genetics ; Encephalomyelitis, Autoimmune, Experimental/etiology/immunology/*prevention and control ; Female ; Gene Expression ; *Genes, T-Cell Receptor beta ; In Vitro ; Injections, Intradermal ; Lymphocyte Activation ; Mice ; Myelin Basic Proteins/immunology ; RNA, Messenger/genetics/metabolism ; Rats ; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural ; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't ; Vaccines, DNA/*administration and dosage/genetics