Thirty years after “interferon-β2: interleukin-6 at the host-tumor interface

My laboratory stumbled on to “interferon-2” (IFN-2) in 1980 and subsequently cloned and assigned the human gene to chromosome 7. By 1988 this cytokine, also independently discovered by several other investigators, was dubbed “interleukin-6” (IL-6). Already in 1988-1989 we discovered that IL-6 was an almost invariant presence at the host-tumor interface in a variety of human solid tumors with both the tumor cells and stromal elements showing strong-to-moderate IL-6 immunoreactivity. The early studies also showed that circulating IL-6 was commonly increased in cancer patients and that glucocorticoids and estradiol-17 inhibited the IL-6 promoter. Today, the contributions of IL-6/STAT3 signaling have emerged as central to the interplay between infection and cancer, in promoting cancer metastases (e.g. breast, colon, liver) and in explaining gender- and obesity-related bias in cancer incidence (e.g. of liver cancer – less in women compared to males but high in obesity).