Reply to Letter to the Editor:Comment on response to paper by d'Oleire et al.
Abstract
INT. J. HYPERTHERMIA, VOL. 13, NO. 4, 437 1997, Reply to Letter to the Editor Comment on response to paper by dâOleire et al. I read the paper of dâOleire, Katschinski and Robins (International Journal of Hyperthermia, 13, pp. 337-338, 1997) about my paper (International Journal of Hyperthermia, 12, pp. 791-800, 1996) with interest as these authors have made major contributions concerning WBH and the role of cytokines. However, their paper on this issue in Cancer Letters (1995) appeared only after the first submission of the manuscript of my paper. I agree with their comments concerning the bioassay that this assay has its limitations, firstly with regard to the detection level and also in that it is not specific between IL-1 alpha and IL-1 beta. However, when we started the work ELISA kits were not commercially available for IL-1 and IL-6 in rats (unlike those for mice and man). A drawback of the ELISA technique is that it measures also biologically inactive protein as long as the intact epitope for the immune reaction is available. Taking these last two points into account we started our work a couple of years ago. We concentrated on three cytokines usually found