Interleukin-1 and Interleukin-6 Inhibitor – Immunosuppressive Drugs

00:02 Let’s take a look at an interleukin-1 blocker.

00:05 Now, Kineret is a well-known drug, it is an interleukin-1 antagonist and it is often used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis but we also can use it in newer onset multisystem autoimmune diseases in the inflammatory diseases.

00:21 We have some certain syndromes that are being treated with this so the treatments are just starting out in rheumatoid arthritis and slowly expanding into other autoimmune diseases.

00:33 Now avoid this medication in patients who have active infections.

00:38 It makes sense that suppressing the immune system in a person who's sick and infected is not gonna end well.

00:45 Avoid this drug in latent tuberculosis so even though they don’t have an active infection you can risk people getting very sick in the case of a reactivation.

00:56 Avoid this drug in patients who have low white blood cell counts and avoid this drug on people who have been taking tumor necrosis factor inhibitors.

01:06 The adverse events associated with this medication usually, all of them I would say, injection site reactions but also look out for some neurological symptoms like headaches.

01:16 Sometimes you can have rise in cholesterol through an unknown mechanism and finally severe infection.

01:22 So we have seen patients for example who decided to take this medication for the treatment of their rheumatoid arthritis end up in the hospital with quite severe life-threatening infections so be very aware that sometimes these drugs can have serious consequences if they're not given to the right patient.

01:41 Next we have the interleukin-6 inhibitors.

01:44 Now these blockers of interleukin-6 are often used in rheumatoid arthritis - systemic rheumatoid arthritis and juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

01:54 We also have used it in patients who have multiple myeloma and, in some cases, now we're starting to use it in prostate cancer.

02:02 It seems counter intuitive to use an IL-6 inhibitor in prostate cancer but there are certain mechanisms that actually reduce the progression of prostate cancer using IL-6 inhibitors.