Therapeutically-induced autoantibodies in patients treated with recombinant hematopoietic growth factors: A brief summary

Since recombinant gene technology was established to provide rare important regulatory proteins as recombinant molecules, cytokine therapies have widely developed and enormously contributed to the treatment of various diseases; nevertheless, it has been revealed that recombinant therapeutic molecules are not always perfect because of side-effects related to pharmacological functions of cytokines and/or potential antigenicity observed in some clinical cases. Although studies on the antigenicity of recombinant proteins have initiated, and observations in clinical studies have been accumulated over this decade, mechanisms of the autoantibody production are not clarified yet. Among various hematopoietic growth factors introduced into clinical trials, this report summarizes current issues of autoantibodies to primary regulators for terminal hematopoiesis.