Tocilizumab: A new anti-rheumatic drug

Tocilizumab, A new anti-rheumatic drug developed by Hoff- mann–La Roche and Chugai under the trade name Actemra. It was recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) on January 2010 for the treatment of moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis. It is a humanized monoclonal antibody targeted against the interleukin-6 recep- tor (IL-6R) causing immunosuppression and mainly used for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (Haghighi and Safari, 2008). Interleukin 6 is a cytokine that has a main role in immune response and is implicated in the pathogenesis of many diseases, such as autoimmune diseases, multiple myeloma and prostate cancer