Anti‐cytokine vaccines and the immunotherapy of autoimmune diseases

Abstract

Three papers in this issue of the European Journal of Immunology describe the use of cytokine vaccines to prevent autoimmune disease in experimental animals. The vaccines are based on interleukin 17 (IL-17), a cytokine that has recently been shown to play a central role in inflammation.

Vaccination with IL-6 analogues induces autoantibodies to IL-6 and influences experimentally induced inflammation

“…Anti-cytokine vaccination as a therapeutic principle is appealing [43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56]: (i) It is simple and inexpensive (the basis of good clinical compliance); (ii) it might induce a profound anti-cytokine autoantibody response after a few injections; (iii) the endogenously produced antibodies are able to activate, various Fc dependent effector mechanisms and hence, effectively clear cytokine containing immune complexes (which might be difficult with passively transferred monoclonal antibodies [57,58]); (iv) the vaccine is apparently well tolerated (considered by no acute side effects of the vaccine [12,13] and the fact that high-titered cytokine autoantibodies are spontaneously produced by apparently healthy individuals [2,7,37,40]). …”

Role of regulatory T cells and FOXP3 in human diseases

“…Others need further studies. 85,86 Along the same lines, the use of IL-17 or IL-12/IL-23 targeted therapies would not only constrain the inflammatory cascade leading to autoimmune deviation but also counteract events interfering with Treg function and therefore ultimately contribute to preserving or re-establishing immune tolerance.…”

Both Th1 and Th17 Are Immunopathogenic but Differ in Other Key Biological Activities

“…Yet, highly purified Th1 cells have been shown in numerous studies to be highly immunopathogenic and capable of inducing experimental autoimmune disease at low cell numbers (12)(13)(14). It has been proposed, therefore, that both Th1 and Th17 are involved in the pathogenic process, with each cell type playing a certain specific role (2,3,15,16).…”