IL6 and inflammatory bowel disease: Cytokines such as TNF-α and IL6 were highly expressed in humans with IBD (Reinecker et al., 1993) and experimental models of IBD (Yoshida et al., 2011; Senchenkova et al., 2013; Yan et al., 2014), and interventions to block their accumulation could protect against colitis (Souza et al., 2015).