Adaptive and maladaptive mechanisms of cellular priming.

OBJECTIVE: The mechanisms of cellular priming resulting in both adaptive and maladaptive responses to subsequent injury and strategies for manipulating this priming to constructive therapeutic advantage are explored. BACKGROUND DATA: A cell is prepared or educated by an initial insult (priming stimulus). Investigations in both laboratory animals and humans indicate that cells, organs, and perhaps even whole patients respond differently to a proximal second insult ("second hit") by virtue of this prior environmental history. The opportunity to achieve the primed state appears to be conserved across almost all cell types. The initial stimulus transmits a message to the cellular machinery that influences the cell's response to a subsequent challenge. This response may result in an exaggerated inflammatory response in the case of the neutrophil (an often maladaptive process) or an improved tolerance to injury by the myocyte (adaptive response). Our global hypothesis is that cellular priming is a conserved, receptor-dependent process that invokes common intracellular targets across multiple cell types. We further postulate that these targets create a language based on the transient phosphorylation and dephosphorylation of intracellular enzymes that is therapeutically accessible.
CONCLUSIONS: Priming is a conserved, receptor-dependent process transduced by means of intracellular targets across multiple cell types. The potential therapeutic strategies outlined involve the receptor-mediated manipulation of cellular events. These events are transmitted through an intracellular language that instructs the cell regarding its behavior in response to subsequent stimulation. Understanding these intracellular events represents a realistic goal of priming and preconditioning biology and will likely lead to clinical control of the primed state.