Signal transduction pathway and blocking strategies of NF-κB

NF-κB is thought of as a genetic switch to control expressions of many target genes and directly participates in pathogenesis of infection, inflammation, stress, immunoresponse, cellular apoptosis, toxic shock and tumor as well as cell-cycle regulation and cell differentiation.The overactivation of NF-κB is intimately involved in many human diseases.Various therapeutic strategies against NF-κB, to date, in-clude anti-inflammatory drugs, antioxidants, immunosuppressive agents, inhibitors of protease and protea-some, prostaglandings, nitric oxide, IL-10, microbial products, synthetic inhibitors, antisense oligon cleotides and decoy deoxyoligonucleotides.Studies are underway to develop NF-κB member-specific and cell type-specific drugs that can inhibit the activation of NF-κB only in target cells and that may become a novel way to treat the human diseases.