Adjunctive immune therapy for fungal infections

Fungal infections in immunocompromised patients can pose difficult problems in clinical management, because the available antifungal chemotherapy is o ften unable to eradicate the infection in these people. Hence, the use of i mmune modulating therapy to augment impaired host immune responses-and thus enhance the efficacy of antifungal drugs-is a reasonable approach to impro ve the prognosis of fungal infections. Advances in biotechnology have produ ced a variety of biological response modifiers with the potential to serve as adjunctive immune therapy for the treatment of fungal infections, includ ing cytokines, monoclonal antibodies, and cell grow-th factors. In recent y ears, immune-modulating therapies have been studied in an effort to define their potential use for the treatment of fungal infections. Much of the ava ilable information on the use of this approach is encouraging and invites f urther investigation-with the caveats that the information is mostly anecdo tal and that immune-modulating therapy occasionally has produced adverse ef fects.