Letter

Passive immunotherapy of sepsis with intravenous immune globulin: not all IVIg preparations are created equal

Tchavdar Vassilev^* and Michael Bauer

• * Corresponding author: Tchavdar Vassilev Tchavdar.Vassilev@med.uni-jena.de

Author Affiliations

Center for Sepsis Control and Care, University Hospital, Friedrich Schiller University, Erlanger Allee 101, 07747 Jena, Germany

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Critical Care 2012, 16:407 doi:10.1186/cc10607

Published: 25 January 2012

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

Normal intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) preparations are known to neutralize a wide array of pathogens plus their virulence factors and in addition possess broad anti-inflammatory and immunomodulating activities. However, these preparations have not been really successful in their present form in preventing sepsis-related death. The recent report by the International Neonatal Immunotherapy Study Collaborative Group is the account of the last in a series of clinical trials that have failed to show an effect of IVIg administration on sepsis outcome [1]. Each batch of IVIgs is produced by fractionation of a plasma pool obtained from at least 10,000 healthy donors. All these studies have used different immunoglobulin preparations assuming that their properties are identical as the IgG repertoire in them is representative for a large population of healthy plasma donors.