Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark (FBL) is published by IMR Press from Volume 26 Issue 5 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.
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In this review, we discuss recent progress from studies on the biology of IL-21 and the role of this cytokine in the pathogenesis of autoimmunity. Recent studies have demonstrated that IL-21 plays an important and non-redundant role in a number of autoimmune animal models indicating that IL-21 could be a common modulator of the adaptive immune response towards self-tissue constituents in diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus, models of rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and type-1 diabetes. Also, the studies on the production of IL-21 in human autoimmune diseases and its behaviour on human cells in vitro are revealing the potential of IL-21 to exacerbate cellular processes that determine the course of autoimmune diseases.