Fire raiser or fire accelerant A meeting report on the 14th International TNF Conference 2013

摘要

The 14th TNF conference, held in the city of Quebec, Canada, provided a comprehensive platform to discuss exciting novel findings that will significantly advance the field in years to come. Organized by Jen Gommerman, Linda Burkly, Gail Bishop, Carl Ware and Tania Watts, the program comprised an excellent choice of talks and posters providing novel insight into signaling pathways of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-superfamily members triggering autoimmune inflammation, cell death and infection-related immune response. In particular, the questions whether non-apoptotic cell death would cause autoimmune inflammation and therefore precede it, whether cell death was a consequence of aberrant inflammation and whether players of the non-apoptotic cell death machinery had a 'day job' in promoting inflammation independently of cell death induction were intensely debated. In the following meeting report, we will summarize data and ideas discussed at the meeting. Owing to space limitations, we have focused on summarizing scientific findings that dealt with the above-mentioned topics and unpublished data.