Artesunate interacts with Vitamin D receptor to reverse mouse model of sepsis-induced immunosuppression via enhancing autophagy

Shenglan Shang; Jiaqi Wu; Xiaoli Li; Xin Liu; Pan Li; Chunli Zheng; Yonghua Wang; Songqing Liu; Jiang Zheng; Hong Zhou

Autophagy is a fundamental cellular process involved in defensive against infection by eliminating intracellular pathogens and regulating inflammation (Casanova, 2017) , and autophagy has been considered a new target in sepsis treatment (Ren, Zhang, Wu & Yao, 2017) . Herein, combined with our previous study (Kuang et al., 2018) , we considered that autophagy was enhanced in the early sepsis stage (cytokine storm stage), but suppressed in the later sepsis stage (immunosuppression stage). Our results also showed AS could enhance . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.26.966143 doi: bioRxiv preprint autophagy in LPS tolerance cells to eliminate bacteria, and inhibiting autophagy using ATG16L1 siRNA or autophagy inhibitors could lead to loss of AS's effects in bacteria clearance and cytokines releases, suggesting autophagy plays a crucial part in AS's effect.