Introduction
Surgical synovectomy to remove the inflammatory synovium, can temporarily ameliorate rheumatoid inflammation and delay the progress of joint destruction. An efficient medically induced programmed cell death (apoptosis) in the RA synovium might play a similar role as synovectomy. Gene transfer of FasL has increased the frequency of apoptotic cells in collagen induced mouse arthritis synovium. In this study, we investigated whether a repeated FasL gene transfer could function as a molecular synovectomy to remove human inflammatory synovial tissue in situ.