Significant advancements have been made in rheumatoid arthritis (RA)The most common autoimmune type of arthritis. In RA, your body’s immune system begins to react against its own tissues, causing significant inflammation in your... treatments in recent years, with many patients experiencing slower disease progression. However, there are still unmet needs in this area.
According to Dr. Michael Brenner, rheumatologist and immunology researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School, most patients only experience a partial benefit from available medications, and about a third may achieve full remission. Some patients don’t respond to any current treatments, highlighting the ongoing challenge of finding more effective therapies.
Dr. Brenner and his team, supported by a Foundation Innovative Research Award, are focused on finding new treatments for these patients by investigating inflammatoryInflammation is a normal part of the body’s defense to injury or infection, and, in this way, it is beneficial. But inflammation is damaging when... pathway activation, an alarm triggered when the body detects a threat, such as tissue damage, and responds to protect itself.
To conduct their research, they collected inflamed tissue from patients analyzed individual cells.
“What is [the individual cell] doing, and what’s causing it to behave abnormally? That molecular information, which we refer as the genomic level, allows us to understand how we might block that abnormal activity and restore the cell to a more normal state,” explains Dr. Brenner.
By identifying abnormalities in these inflamed cells, researchers can collaborative with pharmaceutical and biotech companies to make drugs that target and block the abnormal pathways, thereby reducing inflammationInflammation is a normal part of the body’s defense to injury or infection, and, in this way, it is beneficial. But inflammation is damaging when....
Brenner says they recently discovered a new aggressive inflammationInflammation is a normal part of the body’s defense to injury or infection, and, in this way, it is beneficial. But inflammation is damaging when... pathway that is driven by a enzyme present in T cells, white blood cellsA type of blood cell that is made in the bone marrow and found in the blood and lymph tissue. White blood cells are part... that accumulate in the tissue of rheumatoid arthritisThe most common autoimmune type of arthritis. In RA, your body’s immune system begins to react against its own tissues, causing significant inflammation in your... patients.
“This was previously unknown—we discovered it with Foundation funding over the past two or three years,” says Brenner.
Looking ahead, Dr. Brenner to the future, Brenner says AI technology is going to be increasingly used in helping researchers develop new treatments.
“There have been significant advances in biology, technology, and computational science. These fields are converging, dramatically accelerating our understanding of disease mechanisms and the identification of drug targets, particularly in inflammatoryInflammation is a normal part of the body’s defense to injury or infection, and, in this way, it is beneficial. But inflammation is damaging when... and autoimmuneAny disorder in which loss of function or destruction of normal tissue arises from humoral or cellular immune responses to the body’s own tissue constituents.... diseases.”