The Chemistry of Attraction

Chemokines and their receptors help direct cell migration to sites of inflammation.

You heard it here--chemokine receptors and ligands are in. Inflammation, cancer, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, angiogenesis, and AIDS are just a few areas in which chemokines and their receptors are crucial. Therefore, chemokine pathways represent potentially valuable therapeutic targets. Asthma, one of the most common chronic diseases in the industrialized world, is recognized as an inflammatory disease, and steroids are the treatment of choice. However, concern about the long-term effects of steroid use has researchers studying chemokine receptor function in their quest for alternative treatments. Another factor in the fashionability of chemokine receptors made headlines when a chemokine receptor was found to be a coreceptor for HIV-1.¹

Chemokines, short for chemotactic cytokines, are a complex superfamily of small, secreted proteins (6-14 kD) that were originally characterized by their effects on a variety of leukocytes. Usually...