Project description:We screened vasculitis-specific molecules by combining the findings from serum proteome analysis and whole blood bulk RNA sequencing. We validated the results using immunohistochemical staining and spatial transcriptome analysis of their tissues. Finally, we elucidated the significant molecule to reflect the landscape of systemic vasculitis using trans-omics analysis.
Project description:Autoimmune diseases are common and debilitating, but their severe manifestations could be reduced if biomarkers were available to allow individual tailoring of the potentially toxic immunosuppressive therapy required for their control. Clinically useful biomarkers have been identified using DNA microarrays in cancer but not autoimmunity. We show that transcriptional profiling of purified CD8 T cells, but not unseparated cells, identifies two distinct patient subgroups predicting long-term prognosis in two different autoimmune diseases, anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA) – associated vasculitis (AAV) and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). We show that genes defining the poor prognostic group are enriched for genes of the IL7R pathway, TCR signalling and those expressed by memory T cells. Furthermore, the poor prognostic group is associated with an expanded CD8 T cell memory population. These subgroups, which are also found in the normal population and can be identified by measuring expression of only three genes, raise the prospect of individualized therapy and suggest novel potential therapeutic targets in autoimmunity.
Project description:Purpose: The goal of this study was to compare gene expression profiles from whole blood RNA-Seq data from pediatric ANCA-associated vasculitis patients to identify mechanistic endotypes. Methods: Whole blood mRNA profiles were generated from pediatric and adult vasculitis patients using Illumina GAIIx or Hi Seq 2500 RNA-Seq. Fastq files were alinged to human genome version GRC38.91 using STAR v2.6 and count data was generated with HTSEQ v0.61p1. Counts that passed quality and minimum expression filteres were anlayzed by hierarchical clustering based on Euclidean distance, and then for differential expression with DESeq2. Results: Our workflow identified 14,156 transcripts consistently expressed in vasculitis patients. Distance hierarchcial clustering identified three groups within these pediatric samples, and two groups plus one outlier in the adult samples. The two largest pediatric clusters were used as groups for differential expression analysis with the DESeq2 package for R. DE analysis identified 3,809 differentially expressed genes between clusters. Between the two adult groups, 1,682 genes were differentially expressed. DE genes were anlayzed for enrichment using ReatomePA as the reference database. This analysis revealed that genes involved in T-cell mediated immunity are more highly expressed in pediatric patients that fell into one endotype and those involved in neutrophil and Toll-like receptor mediated inflammation are more highly expressed in pediatric patients that fell into the other endotype group. Similar results were also seen in adults. Conclusions: This study utilizes RNA-Seq data to investigate the etiologies of ANCA-associated vasculitis. Using this approach we have identified T-cell mediated immunity and Toll-like receptor mediated inflammation as potentially differing inflammatory mechanisms in both pediatric and adult vasculitis patients that do not fall along normal diagnostic criteria.
Project description:We performed spatial transcriptomics on a case series of different clinical subtypes of cutaneous lupus erythematosus including acute cutaneous lupus erythematosus (malar rash, systemic lupus erythematosus). Our goals were to (1) determine which differentially expressed genes (DEGs) could be attributed to specific cell populations in specific locations within the tissue, (2) determine if spatial transcriptomics could better distinguish between CLE clinical subtypes than bulk RNA approaches and (3) examine potential cell-cell communication pathways within the skin lesions.