A discovery that focuses on personalized medicine could pave the way for a more effective way to treat lupus.
Lupus is a chronic disease that causes the body’s immune system to attack its own tissues, causing inflammation, pain and organ damage. It’s a complicated condition that’s difficult to diagnose, and complex to treat since no two cases are alike.
Treatment for lupus often requires steroids or strong immunosuppressive drugs, which carry their own risks. Since clinical trials to find other effective drug treatments have had only limited success, researchers from Baylor Scott & White Health in Dallas decided to take another approach.
They studied the transcription of genes in 924 blood samples from 158 pediatric lupus patients for up to four years. This approach, which measures gene expression activity of different cell types, allowed them to classify patients into seven groups with similar molecular disease structure at the time of both disease flares and remissions.
The researchers believe this study, which appears in Cell, could lead to more personalized approaches to develop new treatments to fight lupus, which is a disease that raises the risk of kidney failure, heart disease, and other infections.