The Biology of the Interferon System

Abstract

THE BIOLOGY OF THE INTERFERON SYSTEM T he Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) sponsored its second conference on "The Biology of the Interferon System" on 18-22 April 1983 in Rotterdam. Although it came only six months after the Third International Congress for Interferon Research, the meeting was both successful and informative. An unannounced item on the agenda was the election of a committee to review and revise the bylaws of the International Society for Interferon Research (ISIR), a new scientific association. One important task for ISIR will be to encourage better coordination between European and American researchers and limitation of meetings to one large symposium each year. Too much of a good thing may become a bad thing; obtaining scientific results requires some time to work at the bench. Interferon (IFN) is, in many ways, an exemplary biotechnology product. Its discovery 25 years ago spawned great hopes for a major breakthrough in human therapeutics and considerable profits for interested industries. A major hurdle for industrial development, the limited availability of pure material, has largely been overcome in the past few years. K. Cantell developed a convenient method for production of human interferons from buffy coats, a component of blood, that permitted scaling up of production to the limit of the availability of blood donated in Finnish transfusion centers. In 1980, C. Weissman and his collaborators first achieved expression of an interferon gene in E . coli. These developments stimulated the interferon field and marked the beginning of the industrial era of the interferon system. (The expression "the interferon system" alludes to the multiple potentialities of interferon. Coined in 1979, it refers to the fact that different classes of interferon exist that exert different biological activities via a number of different pathways.) Much more research is needed to exploit efficiently all the activities of the interferon system, and most of the presentations at the Rotterdam meeting focused on development of interferon technology rather than its specific applications. For example,