IL17A and autoimmune disease: In addition, IL-23 promotes T cell proliferation, stimulates the differentiation and proliferation of downstream effectors such as Th17 cells (Stritesky et al., 2008), and induces the production of IL-17 (Li et al., 2016), which has been shown to be a major pro-inflammatory cytokine and a major medium in the pathogenesis of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases (Amatya et al., 2017), thus also demonstrating a role for IL-23 in autoimmune diseases.