Preface to the Proceedings of the Workshop on Eosinophils in Allergy and Related Diseases 2014

We are pleased to announce that Allergology International (AI) is publishing the proceedings of the 28thWorkshop on Eosinophils in Allergy and Related Diseases. This Workshop was first established by Prof. Sohei Makino of Dokkyo University in 1988 and has since been held annually under the strong leadership of Prof. Makino, Prof. Takeshi Fukudadalso of Dokkyo Universitydand Prof. Makoto Nagata of Saitama Medical University. The 2014Workshopwas held in Tokyo on October 4, 2014. It was supervised by me (K. Matsumoto; National Research Institute for Child Health and Development) and comprised 28 oral presentations, including one special lecture and one luncheon lecture. This Proceedings issue contains one Review Article representing the special lecture, 8 Original Articles and 5 Letters to the Editor. All of the papers were peer-reviewed and accepted through the AI review process. In the Review Article, Prof. Kenji Izuhara and his colleagues described the history, current understanding and future prospects of periostin biology in relation to allergic inflammation and tissue fibrosis. I would like to note that serum periostin has two characteristics as a biomarker for bronchial asthma: it is both a surrogate biomarker of type 2 immune responses and a biomarker reflecting tissue remodeling and fibrosis. In one Original Article, Nunomura et al. evaluated the role of liver X receptors (LXRs) in cytokine production by murine mast cells. They found that activation of LXRs by a synthetic LXR ligand, GW3965, attenuated antigenor lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced production of pro-inflammatory cytokines, such as IL-1a and IL-1b, by the mast cells, and that LXRb played an important role in that attenuation. Uchimizu et al. evaluated the concentrations of specific granular proteins and the cytokine/chemokine profile in middle ear effusion samples frompatients with eosinophilic otitis media (EOM) and patients with secretory otitis media (SOM). They found that the concentrations of both eosinophil and neutrophil granular proteins were significantly higher in EOM than in SOM, and that they correlated significantly with eosinophil-recruiting chemokine and with IL-6, respectively. These findings suggest that not only eosinophils but also neutrophils are involved in the pathogenesis of middle ear inflammation in EOM. Ogawa et al. evaluated the role of IL-23 in two distinct antigeninduced airway inflammationmodels (intraperitoneal injection followed by intranasal exposure) in IL-23p19-deficient mice. They