TNF and acute respiratory distress syndrome: Since direct measurements of the TNF-α level failed to yield theanticipated results, we decided to assess the effect of theTNF-α-targeting aptamer by analyzing the mRNA expression level of thegenes involved in the regulation and transduction of TNF-α signaling.Genes directly involved in the TNF-α regulatory pathway, whose expressionlevel increases during the development of ALI, were chosen as potentialTNF-α-regulated genes.