Recent advances in cytokines, cytokine receptors and signal transduction.

The Fifth Annual Conference of the International Cytokine Society was held on November 9-13, 1997 at Lake Tahoe, Nevada. This meeting kept up with the tradition of exciting talks and posters, presenting significant advances in our understanding of the cytokine world. As we advance our knowledge, a complex network of interacting cellular communication pathways is revealed. Targeted disruption of genes coding for cytokines, their receptors and their cytoplasmic signaling molecules, became the standard method for a proper assessment of the role of a given cytokine in vivo. Yet, fundamental questions remain unresolved. For instance, it is not yet known how signal specificity is maintained when different cytokine receptors use the same cytoplasmic signaling pathways. The following summary is not comprehensive, rather, it is a collection of representative communications. Many more top quality studies were presented at the meeting and we apologize for not being able to review all of them here.