autoimmune
13 stories tagged "autoimmune"
Oxford Found the Cells That May Mark Which Joints Rheumatoid Arthritis Attacks. They Were There Before You Were Born.
The joints rheumatoid arthritis attacks and the ones it spares are built differently in the womb, seeded with different cells before a single joint ever swells.
Autoimmune & InflammationThe Immune Cells That Calm Autoimmune Disease Can Also Ignite It. One Protein May Hold the Switch.
Regulatory T cells keep autoimmune disease in check, but under inflammation they can shed their identity and turn inflammatory. In mice, researchers find a protein called TIF1γ restrains that defection by sending a runaway growth signal to be destroyed.
Autoimmune & InflammationThe Gut's Doorway Cells Have a Second Job: Landlord to Its Barrier Defenders
Microfold cells were filed away as passive antigen samplers. In mice, they turn out to build and staff the niche that keeps the gut's IL-22 defenders alive, the cytokine that fortifies the intestinal barrier and keeps sampled bacteria contained inside its immune outposts.
Drugs & FDAJ&J Won the First-Ever Drug Approval for Warm Autoimmune Hemolytic Anemia. It Helped About One in Four Patients.
It works by starving rogue antibodies of the recycling route that keeps them alive. Whether it beats the drugs doctors already reach for is the question the first-ever headlines skip.
Autoimmune & InflammationLupus Hits Nine Women for Every Man, and the Reason May Be Hiding in DNA Both Sexes Share
Scientists sequenced more than 1.25 million immune cells and found over 1,000 genetic switches set differently in men and women, with the female side tuned for stronger inflammation. It may help explain why lupus hits nine women for every man.
Autoimmune & InflammationA Lung Atlas Found 1,000 Autoimmune-Risk Genes That Blood Studies Missed
For two decades, geneticists mapped thousands of autoimmune-risk variants that sat silent in blood cells. A 1.1-million-cell lung atlas shows the effects switch on only in immune cells lodged in tissue.
Autoimmune & InflammationWhy Anti-TNF Keeps Failing So Many Crohn's Patients: The Drug Never Reached the Cell Holding the Disease Open
Anti-TNF biologics have muzzled the immune system for 25 years, and up to 46 percent of Crohn's patients still fail them. A single-cell atlas points at the structural cells of the gut wall, epigenetically rewired into a state the drugs were never built to reach.
Autoimmune & InflammationThe Finest Immune Map of the Sarcoid Lung Explains Why Its Targeted Drugs Keep Failing
National Jewish Health charted more than 150,000 immune cells from sixteen sarcoidosis patients and found a disease with too many moving parts for any single drug to switch off. The targeted therapy that got furthest had already failed Phase 3 and erased 83 percent of its maker's value.
Autoimmune & InflammationThe Body's Own Brake on Inflammation: Mapped in 2015, Still Not in a Pill
A kinase called MST4 rides the brake on TRAF6, the protein that lets inflammation spiral, doing gently from inside the cell what broad autoimmune drugs force from the outside. Researchers mapped it in 2015. No pill uses it yet.
Autoimmune & InflammationA Map of 1.1 Million Lung Immune Cells Finds the Genetic Risk for Autoimmune Disease in Tissue, Not Blood
Researchers at La Jolla mapped genetic activity in 1.1 million lung immune cells and found about 1,000 genes whose activity is tuned by disease-risk variants only inside tissue, plus 1,700 that read differently in women than in men.
Autoimmune & InflammationThe Lungs May Be Where Rheumatoid Arthritis Actually Starts
Across Italy, South Korea, and California, higher fine-particle pollution tracks more RA flares and more new cases, and the biology keeps pointing at the airway, not the knee.
Autoimmune & InflammationA Chinese Bark Compound Reached the Black-Box Arthritis Drugs' Pathway From Upstream, in Rats
In rats, a compound from the bark of the Amur cork tree reached the same JAK-STAT pathway as Xeljanz and its black-box cousins, but by rebalancing the cell's fat metabolism instead of blocking the pathway directly.
Autoimmune & InflammationThe Anti-Inflammatory Worm That Only Works If You Feed It Fiber
Feed a rat plenty of fiber and a harmless tapeworm reaches full size and quiets the immune system. Cut the fiber to Western levels and the same worm shrinks, stops reproducing, and its anti-inflammatory power switches off.