Immunoglobulin preparations enriched with IgM and IgA are used in the therapy of severe bacterial infections and for the treatment of acute graft-versus-host disease, but not as yet, in the treatment of autoimmune diseases. We investigated the potential of an IgM- and IgA-enriched immunoglobulin preparation to neutralize activity autoantibodies from patients with autoimmune diseases. We demonstrate that Pentaglobin(R) was at least as effective as intravenous immunoglobulin (Sandoglobulin(R)) in inhibiting autoantibody activity. Each of the immunoglobulin isotypes present in Pentaglobin(R) may be responsible for the inhibitory effect. Pentaglobin(R) immobilized on an affinity matrix retained the disease associated autoantibodies and interacted with F(ab')2 fragments of IgG autoantibodies. Suppression of autoantibody activity is dependent, at least in part, on idiotypic interactions. The present findings provide a rationale for considering these preparations for the immunomodulation of autoimmune disease.

The use of the Internet must be able to be in confidence for users but security provisioning has a cost for ISPs 1 . In a mobility context this security must be set up from scratch after each handover and for each customer. Therefore, a mechanism has been designed in the standardization bodies: the Context Transfer. This mechanism aims to transfer suitable information between equipments in order to reduce handover time. The benefit for an operator would then be a same security level during and after handover in mobile networks but with a cost as lower as possible. The purpose of this paper is to set out an application of the Context Transfer Protocol to IPsec 2 in a IPv6 mobile environment. After a state of the art of context transfer for security, the paper quickly presents CXTP 3 defined at the IETF 4 . Then, it defines the IPsec context and finally, it describes a CXTP based solution to transfer this context between two access routers in a IPv6 mobility environment.