Protein / target
Interleukin-7
Protein at a glance
Biological role
Interleukin-7 receptor binding
Strongest disease association
Severe Combined Immunodeficiency
Research activity
Emerging research
Derived from structured UniProt, Open Targets and literature data on this page.
Protein profile
Canonical identity and biological annotation from UniProt.
Function overview
Hematopoietic cytokine that plays an essential role in the development, expansion, and survival of naive and memory T-cells and B-cells thereby regulating the number of mature lymphocytes and maintaining lymphoid homeostasis.
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Hematopoietic cytokine that plays an essential role in the development, expansion, and survival of naive and memory T-cells and B-cells thereby regulating the number of mature lymphocytes and maintaining lymphoid homeostasis (PubMed:25870237, PubMed:7527823). Mechanistically, exerts its biological effects through a receptor composed of IL7RA subunit and the cytokine receptor common subunit gamma/CSF2RG (PubMed:8128231). Binding to the receptor leads to activation of various kinases including JAK1 or JAK3 depending on the cell type and subsequently propagation of signals through activation of several downstream signaling pathways including the PI3K/Akt/mTOR or the JAK-STAT5 (PubMed:18523275, PubMed:20974963)
Subcellular location
Domains and Gene Ontology detail (18)Hide
Gene Ontology
- Cextracellular matrix
- Cextracellular region
- Cextracellular space
- Fcytokine activity
- Fgrowth factor activity
- Finterleukin-7 receptor binding
- Panimal organ morphogenesis
- Pbone resorption
- Pcell-cell signaling
- Pcytokine-mediated signaling pathway
- Phumoral immune response
- Pinterleukin-7-mediated signaling pathway
Biological roles
What this protein does, drawn together from its UniProt function, Gene Ontology terms and Reactome pathways.
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Cell proliferation & survival
- ·positive regulation of cell population proliferation
Immune signalling
- ·Hematopoietic cytokine that plays an essential role in the development, expansion, and s…
- ·cytokine activity
- ·interleukin-7 receptor binding
- ·cytokine-mediated signaling pathway
Concepts derived from UniProt GO Reactome — each badge above shows which sources supported that role.
Translational evidence
Why this target matters therapeutically, strongest evidence first. Disease associations are gene-level (via the gene that encodes this protein) and open into the full confidence synthesis; the development universe, tractability and safety annotations are target-level, from Open Targets.
Strongest disease associations · via encoding gene IL7
Gene-level evidence surfaced through the gene IL7that encodes this protein — not a direct protein–disease relationship. Ranked by Forefront's causal-directness weighting, so genetically- and clinically-evidenced diseases lead over ones that merely share the literature.
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The evidence agreement range shows how closely the independent evidence families agree — it is not a statistical confidence interval, and nothing here is fitted to outcome data. Derived from Open Targets evidence types under Forefront weighting; the per-type scores above show the calculation.
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Tractability
Antibodies — Emerging
View underlying tractability evidence (3)Hide
Raw Open Targets tractability assessment buckets, by modality.
Safety-related annotations
Terms indexed against this target in Open Targets' safety data, with their datasource. These are annotations, not causal claims: the direction of effect (whether activation or inhibition is implicated), species and evidence strength are not captured here, so an entry does not mean that modulating this target is known to cause that condition.
Research activity
Papers linked directly to this protein. This is the protein's own literature — descriptor-derived papers are kept separate below.
Most cited
Recent
Europe PMC papers linked directly to this protein.