Background: SLE is a typical chronic autoimmune disease.Considerable evidences support the notion that impaired or delayed clearance of apoptotic cells is respossible for the development of SLE.Tim was newly identified as an immunomodulatory protein family in 2011.Tim-3 is a pattern recognition receptor for recognition and binding of PS.Recently, it is found that Tim-3 is also expressed on innate immune cells such as macrophages and dendritic cells, so it can mediate of the uptake, engulfment of apoptotic cells and plays a role in immune tolerance.Previous results showed that relative Tim-3 mRNA expression level was higher in SLE patients, but there was no significant difference.