text: Increased IL-17 production in PBMC of patients with RA by anti-CD3 and/or anti-CD28, and PHA
  Because IL-17 was already known from earlier reports to be produced mainly by activated T cells, we investigated the effect of different concentrations of anti-CD3 (1, 5 and 10 mug/ml) as a T cell activation, which showed a dose-dependent increase in IL-17 levels (data not shown). On the basis of this, we chose 10 mug/ml as a stimulation concentration for anti-CD3. As shown in Table 1, anti-CD3 significantly upregulated IL-17 production up to 3.7-fold, and the combination of anti-CD28 and anti-CD3 produced more IL-17 (approximately 1.3-1.5-fold) than anti-CD3 alone. Furthermore, when incubated with T cell mitogens such as PHA, increased IL-17 production was more pronounced than with anti-CD3 and anti-CD28 (588 +/- 85 versus 211 +/- 1 pg/ml; P < 0.05). 
  