Taken together, we report here that the absence of LFA-1 promotes more severe EAE with increased demyelination and increased numbers of inflammatory CX-4945 order cells migrating into the CNS. Moreover, we demonstrate that the loss of LFA-1 led to impaired generation of Treg, which in turn explains the observed overshooting autoimmune response

against the MOG antigen. To examine the role of LFA-1 in EAE induction, we used a standard mouse model based on the subcutaneous immunization of C57BL/6 mice with MOG35–55 peptide emulsified in CFA. The experiment was performed with WT (LFA-1+/+), LFA-1-deficient (LFA-1−/−), and heterozygous mice (LFA-1+/−) as an additional control. LFA-1+/− mice express LFA-1 at an intermediate level (data not shown). All experiments were performed with littermates Galunisertib order to exclude any effects of different C57BL/6 substrains. WT mice typically developed first clinical signs of EAE between days 10 and 15 and reached the peak of disease between days 18 and 23. Clinical signs persisted on the peak level for at least 5–7 days before they slowly decreased. Interestingly, LFA-1 KO animals developed dramatically aggravated clinical signs and reached significantly higher clinical scores over the whole observation period (mean cumulative disease score until

day 29: 31.4 versus 14.7, p<0.0001, calculated across three independent experiments with n=28 or n=27 animals per group). A typical experiment is shown in Fig. 1 and Table 1. In addition, the incidence of EAE through day 21 was clearly higher, with 97.5% (±5.6) diseased LFA-1−/− compared with 69.8% (±6.8) LFA-1+/+ animals (incidence +/− SEM, calculated from six independent experiments with n=7–15 animals per group). In terms of clinical signs, LFA-1+/− mice behaved similar to the WT mice, indicating that the intermediate expression of LFA-1 in these mice is sufficient for the biological function. EAE pathology is mainly caused by the infiltration of inflammatory cells into the CNS tissue. This local inflammation subsequently leads to demyelination and axonal

damage. We therefore analyzed the spinal cord IKBKE of diseased mice for typical signs of inflammation and demyelination by histology (Fig. 2). At the peak of the disease, significantly more perivascular infiltrates per spinal cord cross-section were found in LFA-1−/− mice compared with LFA-1+/+ (LFA-1−/−: 4.4±1.0, LFA-1+/+: 1.16±0.28, and p=0.024). Similarly, the extent of demyelination was significantly more prominent in LFA-1−/− (9.31±1.9%), whereas in LFA-1+/+ almost no demyelination was observed (0.76±0.48%; p=0.004). Moreover, in three out of the five LFA-1−/− mice prominent inflammatory infiltrates were detected in cerebellum and/or brain, whereas in the LFA-1+/+ mice only sparse inflammatory infiltrates in the cerebellum and/or brain were found (Fig. 2B).