Precision attack on calcineurin in macrophages: a new anti-inflammatory weapon.

Inflammation is a hallmark of many common diseases ranging from arthritis, atherosclerosis, or obesity to Alzheimer's disease and cancer. Identifying antiinflammatory mechanisms is therefore an important and timely task of modern biomedicine. In this issue of The EMBO Journal, a study conducted by Escolano and colleagues target a particular interaction site of calcineurin with NFAT in macrophages to elicit profound anti-inflammatory effects (Escolano et al, 2014).