My goal today is to get people to understand something that has no definition.

You can't find a single definition of a cytokine storm as of right now, but I think that

will change.

The term is being used a lot, cytokine storm, cytokine storm in this pandemic of COVID. it's not at all totally unique to COVID, but obviously

has captured a lot of attention out there. And for a lot of people dealing with hospitalized patients

in a pandemic, it has gotten so busy out there that just at the end of the day, we're all proud of ourselves for staying off crack.

And one of the big reasons we are so busy in this SARS-CoV-2 virus pandemic is immune dysregulation.

Well, in a disease process like an infection, you want just the right amount of appropriate

immune and inflammatory response.

And if that response gets dysregulated, then you can have too much inflammation.

And when there's a really big inflammatory response, sometimes the term cytokine storm is being thrown

around these days.

But by no means was SARS-CoV-2 the first time that this cytokine storm terminology has come about.

In fact, if you look at a drug like Tocelizumab, which so far is not

panned out very well for the cytokine storm of COVID, well, its earliest use as an anti-interlucin-6

receptor monoclonal antibody was in the cytokine storm of Castleman's disease.

And so at the very outset, I want to say that different diseases can set off different kinds

of cytokine storm. So it's this kind of all-encompassing term. It's several disorders of immune

dysregulation that results in all kinds of symptoms, usually

with severe systemic inflammation and multi-organ dysfunction that can ultimately lead to

multi-organ failure and death.

And it kind of comes down to which cytokine and how much of it is made that ultimately determines what the

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