Physiological And Growth Hormone Dysfunction Servant Serum Insulin-like Growth Factor Binding Protein-3 And Its Proteolytic Enzyme Changes

Insulin-like growth factor (IGF) binding protein (IGFBP) and their proteases play an important role in the biological actions of IGFs. The major IGFBP in human serum is IGFBP-3, which transports more than 95% of the circulating IGFs. Besides its effect on the half-life of IGFs, IGFBP-3 could modulate the biological activities of IGFs and possess unique IGF-independent actions. IGFBP-3 proteases were found in human pregnant serum recently. It was proved that IGFBP proteases could degrade IGFBP and regulate the bioavailibility of IGFs. So, IGFBP-3 and its protease are the very important members of GH-IGF axis. However, under the various physiological and pathophysiological conditions, the relationships between IGFBP-3 and its protease with serum GH and IGF-1 are not clear yet. The purpose of our study is to develop methods of detecting serum level of IGFBP-3 and IGFBP-3 protease activity, and to analyze how serum IGFBP-3 and its protease exert their ffects on GH-IGF-axis under physiological and phathophysiological conditions.Our studies included three parts:1. Development of radioimmunoassay for human IGFBP-3 in serum.IGFBP-3 antibody was raised and IGFBP-3 was iodinated with...