Persistent Circulating Immune Complexes: Potential Source of Epimutation and Cancer Poor Prognosis

Abstract

Estimation of serum level of circulating immune complexes and its use for monitoring treatments have been carried out extensively in various disease conditions including autoimmune diseases and cancer, but little or no work has considered persistent circulation of immune complexes consequent to physiological anomalies that could mediate epimutation and subsequent epigenetic cell alteration and tumourigenesis. This review looked into the immuno-physiological activities of circulating immune complexes to expose its possible epigenomic consequences and potential role in epimutation. The environmental link between epigenetic cell alteration and formation of circulating immune complexes makes this review a unique one but on the other hand, gives room for concern. Immune complexes have strong capacity to stimulate various immune responses, yet the immunological activities of these circulating immune complexes are over looked or under estimated. Immune complexes is a normal immunological phenomenon but its persistence and subsequent deposition could induce endogenous assaults that would continuously and adversely perturb the epigenomic activities by fuelling chronic inflammation, activating transcription factors (NFkB), generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and frequent release of cytokines leading to epigenetic cell alteration especially in developing countries where environmental pollution is a serious factor.