Breakthrough on Lupus? Scripps Team Shares News That Could Help Millions

Has a Scripps team in La Jolla found a way to prevent lupus—a debilitating auto-immune disease that afflicts millions around the world?

Hope has been raised with the publication of new research by a team from The Scripps Research Institute, which found that the absence of a certain type of immune cell, or of a key signaling molecule within the cell, could protect against lupus. 

The findings announced Monday could lead to more-targeted therapies for the disease that causes rashes, joint pain, anemia and kidney damage, Scripps researchers wrote in an online article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The article is titled: “Essential requirement for IRF8 and SLC15A4 implicates plasmacytoid dendritic cells in the pathogenesis of lupus.”

Lupus is difficult to diagnose and can lead to fatal blood clots and kidney failure.

None of the current treatments for the illness target its underlying causes, but the findings could make that possible, according to Scripps researchers.

Mice with cells as described by Scripps showed little impairment of their normal immune functions when exposed to lupus.

"We are excited about the potential of such an inhibitor as a new kind of treatment for lupus, as well as other auto-immune conditions," said Argyrios Theofilopoulos, chair of Scripps' Department of Immunology and Microbial Science and a senior author of the study.

According to the researchers, lupus could be caused when certain immune cells defend against proteins and nucleic acids mistakenly identified as foreign.

The mice without a relatively sparse type of immune cells called plasmacytoid dendritic cells were largely protected from the disease, the institute reported.

Theofilopoulos and his team plan to target a protein called SLC15A4 with medications that could suppress the auto-immune response to lupus without dampening the rest of the immune system. Current lupus drugs often place lupus sufferers at higher risk of infections and cancer.

—City News Service