Advantage of Interleukin analysis in clinical medecine and pharmacology

Interleukins are cellular mediators (cytokines) responsible for communication between leukocytes. They interact with the cells by means of high affinity specific receptors located on adjacent leukocytes (paracrin action) or on the productive cell itself (autocrin action). Over the past fifteen years, a dozen interleukins (IL1, IL2,......, IL12) has been identified and fre-quently cloned. All are small proteins (MW between 10 and 25 kD), many of which are glyco-sylated. They play an essential role in the functioning and regulation of the immune system and very often exercise pleiotrophic ef-fects. For example, IL1 intervenes at a number of levels in the regulation of the immune response and in several aspects of the inflam-matory reaction. For its part, IL2 is considered to be a powerful activator of the functions exercised by the T lymphocytes.

Bearing in mind their essential physiological role, interleukins are of great interest to clinical and many therapeutic applications are considered. For example, IL1 could be used as a vaccine adjuvent, as a wound-healing agent or as a stimulator of hematopoiesis. IL2 has essentially been seen as an antitumoral agent (stimulation of cytotoxic T lymphocytes, NK cells and production of LAK cells): the corresponding clinical studies are already very well advanced and significant results have been obtained, mainly in cases of metastasic renal cell cancer and melanomas.

In the context of these clinical studies, it is obviously very impor-tant to have available analytical methods allowing monitoring of the treatment administered (bio-availability, pharmacokinetics,...). To this end, SPI has developed sensitive and specific enzymo-immunometric assays for human l'IL1 (IL1a et IL1b) and l'IL2. These assays are based on the use of monoclonal antibodies and may be applied to the measure-ment of the IL1s and IL2 in various biological media (culture medium, plasma, urine, cell extracts,...). In all cases, they allow measurement of concentrations of interleukines inferior to 20 pg/ml. J.G. &Y.F.

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