IL-17E Austin L. Gurney* Departments of Molecular Biology and Immunology, Genentech, South San Francisco, CA 94080, USA * corresponding author tel: (650) 225-8996, fax: (650) 225-6497, e-mail:
[email protected] DOI: 10.1006/rwcy.2002.0327. SUMMARY Interleukin 17E (IL-17E) is a member of the IL-17 family of cytokines. IL-17E induces expression of a variety of other chemokines and cytokines and thereby acts to influence inflammation and hematopoiesis. Overexpression of IL-17E in transgenic mice results in severe chronic inflammation in multiple tissues and a bias towards a TH2-type immune response. IL-17E is a high-affinity ligand for a receptor IL-17Rh1 (also termed evi27, and IL-17BR) that is distantly related to the IL-17 receptor (IL-17R). BACKGROUND Discovery IL-17 was first identified as a potent proinflammatory cytokine produced by activated memory T cells (Rouvier et al., 1993; Yao et al., 1995; Fossiez et al., 1996; Kennedy et al., 1996). The large-scale sequencing of the human and other vertebrate genomes has revealed the presence of additional genes encoding proteins clearly related to IL-17, thus defining a new family of cytokines that appears to have been highly conserved across vertebrate evolution (Li et al., 2000; Shi et al., 2000; Hymowitz et al., 2001; Lee et al., 2001; Starnes et al., 2001, 2002; Aggarwal and Gurney, 2002). Initial characterization suggests that IL-17E, like IL-17, has a potent ability to modulate immune function (Fort et al., 2001; Lee et al., 2001; Pan et al., 2001; Kim et al., 2002). Its actions can promote induction of both proinflammatory cytokines such as TNF and co-stimulatory molecules such as ICAM as well as cytokines Cytokine Reference most often associated with an antibody-mediated immune response.