IL6 and bacterial infectious disease with sepsis: Overall, the robust post-challenge expression of cytokines (IL-6, TNF-α, IFN-γ, G-CSF, and IL-1RA) and chemokines (IP-10, MCP-1, MIG, and MIP-1α) that we observed shared many similarities with the cytokine profiles of human patients with S. aureus bloodstream infections (Kim et al., 2020; Bergersen et al., 2025) and with bacterial sepsis generally (Angus and van der Poll, 2013).