IMR Press / FBL / Volume 13 / Issue 14 / DOI: 10.2741/3082

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.

Article
The modulatory capacity of interleukin-21 in the pathogenesis of autoimmune disease
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1 Department of Immunology, The Garvan Institute of Medical Research, 384 Victoria St., Darlinghurst, NSW 2010, Australia

*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Academic Editor: Antonio Cava

Front. Biosci. (Landmark Ed) 2008, 13(14), 5304–5315; https://doi.org/10.2741/3082
Published: 1 May 2008
(This article belongs to the Special Issue An update on the pathogenesis of immune dysregulation in autoimmunity)
Abstract

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.

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