{"id":783,"date":"2020-08-26T09:31:58","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T09:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clinlabint.3wstaging.nl\/surprise-rheumatoid-arthritis-discovery-points-to-new-treatment\/"},"modified":"2021-01-08T11:08:20","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T11:08:20","slug":"surprise-rheumatoid-arthritis-discovery-points-to-new-treatment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/surprise-rheumatoid-arthritis-discovery-points-to-new-treatment\/","title":{"rendered":"Surprise rheumatoid arthritis discovery points to new treatment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers at the School of Medicine have identified an unexpected contributor to rheumatoid arthritis that may help explain the painful flare-ups associated with the disease. The discovery points to a potential new treatment for the autoimmune disorder and may also allow the use of a simple blood test to detect people at elevated risk for developing the condition.<\/span>
\nThe arthritis discovery originated in the lab of UVA\u2019s Kodi Ravichandran, PhD, and was facilitated by combining his team\u2019s resources and expertise with that of Inova researcher Thomas Conrads, PhD, through a THRIV UVA-Inova seed grant.<\/span>
\nThe new findings about rheumatoid arthritis came in an unexpected fashion. Sanja Arandjelovic, PhD, a research scientist in the Ravichandran group, was seeking to better understand what causes the inflammation associated with inflammatory arthritis when she noted that deleting a gene called ELMO1 alleviated arthritis symptoms in mice. This was particularly surprising because Arandjelovic and Ravichandran initially thought that loss of ELMO1 would result in increased inflammation.<\/span>
\n\u201cThis was a complete surprise to us initially,\u201d recalled Ravichandran, chairman of UVA\u2019s Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology. \u201cI love those kinds of results, because they tell us that, first, we did not fully comprehend the scientific problem when we began exploring it, and, second, such unexpected results challenge us to think in a different way. Given that rheumatoid arthritis affects millions of people worldwide, we felt the need to understand this observation better.\u201d<\/span>
\nDigging deeper into the unusual outcome, the researchers determined that ELMO1 promotes inflammation via their function in white blood cells called neutrophils. Ravichandran described neutrophils as the body\u2019s \u201cfirst line of defence\u201d because they sense and respond to potential threats. \u201cNormally they are good for us, against many bacterial infections,\u201d he said. \u201cBut also there are many times when they produce a lot of friendly fire that is quite damaging to the tissues \u2013 when they hang around too long or there are too many neutrophils coming in \u2013 in this case, infiltrating into the joints during arthritis.\u201d<\/span>
\nThe researchers also discovered that there is a natural variation in the ELMO1 gene that can prompt neutrophils to become more mobile and have the potential to invade the joints in greater numbers and induce inflammation. (The potential blood test would detect this variation.)<\/span>
\nHere things take a particularly cool turn: Normally, doctors are reluctant to try to block the effect of genes like ELMO1 in people, because such genes can play diverse roles in the body. But Ravichandran believes that ELMO1 is different. \u201cELMO1 partners with very specific set of proteins only in the neutrophils but not in other cells types we tested,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, presumably, you may be able to affect only a select cell type.\u201d This latter result came about from a collaborative study where Conrads\u2019 group at Inova performed sophisticated analysis of ELMO1 proteomic partners in neutrophils, many of which also have previously known links to human arthritis. This provided further validation for the role of ELMO1 in rheumatoid arthritis.<\/span>
\nEncouragingly, blocking ELMO1 in lab mice alleviated arthritis inflammation without causing other problems, Ravichandran noted. His laboratory is now seeking to identify drugs that could inhibit the function of ELMO1 and is also designing a test for the variation (also called polymorphism) in the ELMO1 gene.<\/span>
\n\u201cThis is another example of how fundamental basic research can lead to novel discoveries on clinically relevant problems that affect a large number of people,\u201d Ravichandran said.<\/span><\/p>\n

University of Virginia<\/span>
\nnewsroom.uvahealth.com\/2019\/02\/07\/surprise-rheumatoid-arthritis-discovery-points-to-new-treatment\/<\/link><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Researchers at the School of Medicine have identified an unexpected contributor to rheumatoid arthritis that may help explain the painful flare-ups associated with the disease. The discovery points to a potential new treatment for the autoimmune disorder and may also allow the use of a simple blood test to detect people at elevated risk for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-e-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}