For all of us that enjoy a good, recent, paper on
Post# of 148336
"IL-6 regulates CCR5 expression and immunosuppressive capacity of MDSC in murine melanoma | Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer" (bmj.com)
https://jitc.bmj.com/content/8/2/e000949
As we know, IL-6 is one of the “hallmarks” of inflammatory and many cancer processes. Tocilizumab and Sarilumab among others were launched as IL-6 antagonists to treat several diseases (prostate, ovarian, large-cell lung, arthritis cancer.)
And then re-purposed to treat COVID. They were unsuccessful.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/drug-study-halte...1587985203
The humongous failures of the IL-6 modulators Kevzara/Sarilumab Actrema/Tocilizumab have shown everybody that COVID is a very complex condition.
The former paper concludes:
Quote:
Conclusion Our in vitro and ex vivo findings demonstrated that IL-6 induced CCR5 expression and a strong immunosuppressive activity of MDSC, highlighting this cytokine as a promising target for melanoma immunotherapy. However, IL-6 blocking therapy did not prove to be effective in RET transgenic melanoma-bearing mice but rather aggravated tumor progression. Further studies are needed to identify particular combination therapies, cancer entities or patient subsets to benefit from the anti-IL-6 treatment.
So, directly blocking IL-6 does was not effective, however targeting CCR5 might be. This could translate to COVID as well, but more importantly, signals once more the potential in Oncology.
It is worth remembering that Leronlimab reduced the 14 days IL-6 levels in the Montefiore patients, with a p-value of 0.0371 to normal levels (p-value 0.3431 against “normal”, remember in this latter value more than 0.05 is better).