Mast cell signaling and its role in urticaria

Chronic urticaria is a mast cell (MC)-driven disease characterized by the development of itching wheals and/or angioedema. In the last decades, outstanding progress has been made in defining the mechanisms involved in MC activation, and novel activating and inhibitory receptors expressed in MC surface were identified and characterized. Besides an IgE-mediated activation through high-affinity IgE receptor cross-linking, other activating receptors, including Mas-related G-protein–coupled receptor-X2, C5a receptor, and protease-activated receptors 1 and 2 are responsible for MC activation. This would partly explain the reason some subgroups of chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU), the most frequent form of urticaria in the general population, do not respond to IgE target therapies, requiring other therapeutic approaches for improving the management of the disease. In this review, we shed some light on the current knowledge of the immunologic and nonimmunologic mechanisms regulating MC activation in CSU, considering the complex inflammatory scenario underlying CSU pathogenesis, and novel potential MC-targeted therapies, including surface receptors and cytoplasmic signaling proteins.