Wallace Memorial Baptist Hospital

of NF-κB ligand; VCAM-1, vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 In many clinical situations which cause thymic in-volution and thereby result in immune deficiency, T cells are the most often affected, leading to a prolonged deficiency of T cells. Since only the thymic-dependent T cell production pathway secures stable regeneration of fully mature T cells, seeking strategies to enhance thymic regeneration should be a key step in developing therapeutic methods for the treatment of these sig-nificant clinical problems. This study clearly shows that receptor activator of NF-κB ligand (RANKL) stim-ulates mouse thymic epithelial cell activities including cell proliferation, thymocyte adhesion to thymic epi-thelial cells, and the expression of cell death regulatory genes favoring cell survival, cell adhesion molecule