Clinical Applications of Interleukin-37: A Key Player in the Immunopathogenesis of Immune Disorders

Abstract

Recently, the era of medicine has been encountered with the exponential growth of special seroimmunobiomarkers in clinical trials. Lately, Interleukin-37 (IL-37) has attracted a wide range of basic medical scientists’ attention due to its controversial functions in physiologic or pathologic microenvironments. In this research, an updated overview of immunobiological functions and clinical applications of IL-37 in a wide range of diseases, are discussed in order to highlight the role of recent laboratory-based results of IL-37. Data of this systematic review article were collected from initial 237 articles in Google Scholar search engine, Science Direct, PubMed, Scopus, and Embase databases. Eventually, 134 total articles were considered from March 2000 to June 2019 time interval, by using 5 keywords. Relevant English articles, abstracts and conference papers all were included. No restrictions of methods and type of the article were imposed. As one of the newly immunotherapeutic based approaches, clinical applications of cytokines are promisingly taken into account for diagnosis and treatment of multiple diseases. Various evidence suggests that IL-37 has notable roles in the regulation of acute and chronic inflammatory responses. Also, IL-37 has been studied in pregnancy, obesity, infectious, cardiovascular, neurologic, autoimmune, and metabolic diseases. Also, the protective functions of IL-37 against multiple cancers, are disputably related to the type and stage of cancer as well as the IL-37 variant. The broad spectrum of IL-37 and its receptors in diseases, seem to be a potential candidate with pivotal effects for immunomodulation and immune gene therapy of various pathologic states.

Keywords

• Biomarkers
• Human
• Immune system diseases
• Immunomodulation
• Immunotherapy
• Interleukin-37