Background: Interferon-beta therapy of patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis involves repeated 'immunizations' with exogenous protein solutions. Innate pattern recognition receptors play an important role in immune responses towards foreign substances and may thus be related to treatment outcome.
Objective: To determine the genotypes at 42 single nucleotide polymorphism loci in selected pattern recognition receptors for 567 prospectively followed relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis patients treated with recombinant interferon-beta, and test for relationships to several outcome parameters, including formation of interferon-beta neutralizing antibodies.
Results: The results suggest an association between the rs5743810 polymorphism (Ser249Pro) of TLR6 and development of neutralizing antibodies after 24 months of therapy in males (p = 0.00002), but not in females (p = 0.2). This association survived crude Bonferroni correction (p (corrected) = 0.02). Additional associations were observed in carriers of the TLR2-rs5743708 and NOD2-rs3135499 SNPs (time to relapse), the TLR7-rs179008 and NOD1-rs2075820 SNPs (time to disease progression) and the TLR4-rs7873784, TLR9-rs5743836, and NOD2-rs2066842 SNPs (frequency of neutralizing antibodies development). All of these, however, failed to survive correction for multiple testing. There were no significant differences between interferon-beta responders and non-responders for any of the investigated single nucleotide polymorphisms.
Conclusions: The rs5743810 polymorphism of TLR6 may be involved in development of anti-interferon-beta antibodies in males, although further studies are required to firmly establish this.