Sir, The recent Brain publication (Dalakas et al., 2009) describing a clinical study of alemtuzumab in patients with inclusion body myositis nicely demonstrates the feasibility of enrolling and following a cohort of these patients over a long period of time as participants in an intervention study. The authors state that ‘in [inclusion body myositis] one series of alemtuzumab infusions can slow...

There is now compelling evidence that sporadic inclusion body myositis (sIBM) is a muscle-specific autoimmune disease in which both T and B-cells play a part and in which both cytotoxic muscle fibre necrosis and degeneration occur. However the factors responsible for breakdown of immune tolerance and the nature of the target antigens expressed by muscle fibres remain unknown. Genetic factors ar...

Inclusion body myositis (IBM) is a slowly progressive skeletal muscle disease for which no effective pharmacological therapy is available. Since its initial pathological description 50 years ago, substantial progress has been made in our clinical understanding of IBM. We now have extensive understanding of its demographics, pattern of muscle involvement, and diagnostic criteria, and large amoun...