Upregulation of phagocytosis and candidicidal activity of macrophages exposed to the immunostimulant, acemannan

In vivo evidence of the immunomodulatory activity of orally administered Aloe vera gel

“…Here, we examined the immunomodulatory activity of orally administered PAG in both normal and diabetic mouse models. The immunomodulatory activity of orally administered PAG was first examined in a Candida albicans-infection model based on previous studies showing that acemannan, the major polysaccharide present in Aloe vera gel, mediates its activity mainly through activation of macrophages (Karaca et al, 1995;Zhang and Tizard, 1996;Ramamoorthy et al, 1996;Djeraba and Quere, 2000) and the macrophages activated with acemannan exert enhanced phagocytic and candidicidal activities (Stuart et al, 1997). The kidney is particularly susceptible to Candia albicans infection, and renal failure is the major cause of death in systemic candida infection (Parker et al, 1976).…”

“…Some of the immunoaugmenting activities of acemannan are mediated through the activation of macrophages. Acemannan activates macrophages to produce inflammatory cytokines such as IL-6 and TNF-a (Zhang and Tizard, 1996), increase NO production by macrophages (Karaca et al, 1995;Ramamoorthy et al, 1996;Djeraba and Quere, 2000), and upregulate the phagocytic and candidicidal activities of macrophages (Stuart et al, 1997). Acemannan also augments hematopoiesis (Egger et al, 1996) and induces maturation of immature dendritic cells (Lee et al, 2001).…”

Polysaccharide biological response modifiers

“…Obviously, myeloid cells, which play important roles in both innate and acquire immunity, are the major stimulatory targets of polysaccharide BRMs [153][154][155][156][157][158][159][160][161]. The stimulatory effects of polysaccharide BRMs on macrophage, which is one of the most important myeloid cells, are enhanced phagocytosis [96,122,158,[162][163][164], production of reactive oxygen species [96,162,163,[165][166][167], expression of activation markers like FcR [168] and B-7 molecules [169], and cytokines secretion [96,157,163,165]. The polysaccharide BRMs thus increase the macrophages effector function, antigen processing capacity and capability to modulate acquire immunity through cytokines secretion, antigen presentation and expression of cell adhesion molecule.…”

“…The reported therapeutic properties of polysaccharide BRMs are very diverse which include anti-viral [67,170,[195][196][197][198][199], anti-bacterial [7,8], anti-fungal [155,158], anti-parasitic [200][201], and anti-tumor [67,70,72,73,93,[202][203][204][205][206]. However, the therapeutic data are mainly derived from the study of animal models such as mouse [7,8,67,73,95,157,169,170,195,196,200,[203][204][205]207], cat [195], chicken [159] and pig [198] and [208].…”

Polysaccharides from Aloe vera and Oral Ulcerations

“…In addition, the preexposure of macrophages to acemannan resulted in 38 % killing of Candida albicans by these cells compared with 0-5 % killing in the control group (Stuart et al 1997). …”