BACKGROUND Effective and tolerable treatment options for patients with dermatomyositis and polymyositis are limited. This retrospective case review describes treatment with adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) gel in five patients who experienced a disease exacerbation and either failed or were unable to tolerate the side effects of previous therapy with steroids, intravenous immunoglobulins, and...

Laser diffraction (LD) has been recognized as a method for estimating particle size distribution. Here, a recently developed quantitative LD (qLD) system, which is an LD method with extensive deconvolution analysis, was employed for the quantitative assessment of protein particles sizes, especially aimed at the quantification of 0.2-10 μm diameter subvisible particles (SVPs). The qLD accurately...

1. Uchida K, Nakata K, Suzuki T, et al. Granulocyte/macrophage colonystimulating factor autoantibodies and myeloid cell in healthy individuals. Blood. 2009;113(11):2547-2556. 2. St-Amour I, Laroch A, Bazin R, Lemieux R. Activation of cryptic IgG reactive with BAFF, amyloid beta peptide adn GM-CSF during the industrial fractionation of human plasma into therapeutic intravenous immunoglobulins. C...

Our aim was to find out if immunoglobulins for intravenous use (IVIG) contain IgG-anti-F(ab')2γ (AFab2) and IgG-antiHinge (AH) antibodies (Ab.) and to discuss how AFab2, in particular AH could contribute to immunomodulatory effect of IVIGs. We measured IgG, AFab2 and AH in five IVIG products approved for therapeutic use. IVIG showed higher AFab2 and AH concentration than sera of randomized heal...

Intravenous immunoglobulins cause thromboembolic events at a frequency of 2-3%. Complications of this nature can be life threatening. Nevertheless, a test for thrombogenicity such as non activated partial thromboplastin time is not mandatory for these drugs. As a result of recent incidents we have performed experiments to evaluate a modified thrombin generation test for its ability to detect mi...