Anti-interleukin-23 treatment linked to improved infection survival.

is a leading cause of healthcare-associated infection, and an unacceptably high proportion of patients with infection die despite conventional antibiotic treatment. Host-directed immunotherapy has been proposed as an ideal treatment modality for infection to mitigate the underlying toxin-mediated pathogenic immune response while sparing protective gut microbes. Interleukin-23 monoclonal antibody inhibitors are used extensively to control pro-inflammatory Th17 immune pathways in psoriasis and inflammatory bowel disease that are similarly important during infection. We used a large retrospective electronic health record database to test the hypothesis that hospitalized patients with infection who are on anti-IL-23 treatment will have improved survival compared to patients without anti-IL-23. A total of 9,301 anti-IL-23 patients had significantly lower probability of all-cause death within 30 d (0.54%) compared with 1:1 propensity-matched control patients (3.1%). IL-23 inhibition is a promising adjunct to treatment, and further clinical trials repositioning anti-IL-23 monoclonal antibodies from psoriasis and inflammatory bowel disease to infection are warranted.