FAS and autoimmune disease: Paradoxically, while Fas has a suppressive effect on spontaneous systemic immunity, as seen with the development of autoimmunity in lpr or gld mice, Fas also plays a promoting role in the development of experimentally-induced autoimmune disease, since lpr or gld mice are resistant to EAE, RA, and type I diabetes induction [49,50,53,54,55,57] (Table 1).