Kaposi's Sarcoma, Vascular Permeability, and Scientific Integrity
- Barbara Ensoli, MD, PhD
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
Excerpt
To the Editor. —After a careful reading of the article by Dr Witte and colleagues,1 a scientific response to the authors is necessary.
The authors claim that both the vascular permeability model and the KS-like lesion model used by Nakamura et al2 to demonstrate the effect of SP-PG in KS are invalid or at least not reproducible in their hands. I have used both models for a variety of studies on KS pathogenesis and found both extremely reproducible and fundamentally the same as described by Nakamura et al in their article.
Injection of AIDS KS cells (KS2, KS4, and KS6 cell strains) cultured in conditioned media from human T-cell lymphotropic virus type II (HTLV-II)—transformed T cells as described by Nakamura et al2 indeed induces vascular permeability and edema (12 hours after injection). These features depend on the number of inoculated cells and increase with higher cell number.
