Focus in this project is to define the pathogenetic mechanisms of tissue injury in Rasmussen?s encephalitis (RE). We were the first to document the cytotoxic T-cell attack against neurons in the respective cortical lesions. More recently we showed, that besides neurons also astrocytes are a target of the inflammatory response. Similar inflammatory changes as in RE are also seen in paraneoplastic encephalitis and in a variety of viral encephalitides.