Researchers from Northwestern Medicine and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have made a significant breakthrough in the field of autoimmune diseases. They have identified the cause of lupus, an autoimmune disease affecting about 1.5 million Americans, and believe they may have also found a potential cure. The full name of the disease is Lupus erythematosus, a condition where the body’s immune system attacks its own cells, causing skin complications and potentially life-threatening damage to vital organs such as the heart, kidney, and brain.

The researchers have been studying lupus patients and discovered that those affected by the disease had higher levels of an infection-fighting protein called interferon. They also found that these patients lacked sufficient amounts of aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR), which regulates how the body responds to infection. This imbalance in immune responses is fundamental to lupus, according to Dr. Deepak Rao, a rheumatologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and co-author of the study.

The team is currently working on a pharmacologic method to deliver the potential cure-like molecule. Their goal is to develop medications that can activate the AHR pathway. Insufficiency in this pathway leads to an overproduction of immune cells which promote the production of disease-causing autoantibodies.

“Up until this point, all therapy for lupus is a blunt instrument. It’s broad immunosuppression,” said co-corresponding author Dr. Jaehyuk Choi, associate professor of dermatology at Northwestern University. “By identifying a cause for this disease, we have found a potential cure that will not have the side effects of current therapies.”

The investigators returned AHR-activating molecules to blood samples from lupus patients to demonstrate how this discovery could be utilized for treatments. This process appears to reprogram the lupus-causing cells into a type of cell that may promote wound healing from the damage caused by this autoimmune disease. “We found that if we either activate the AHR pathway with small molecule activators or limit the pathologically excessive interferon in the blood, we can reduce the number of these disease-causing cells,” said Choi. “If these effects are durable, this may be a potential cure.”

This groundbreaking discovery holds significant implications not just for lupus treatment, but also for other autoimmune diseases. Therefore, it is critical to share this potential cure on social media and other platforms.

Image: Lupus effects on the skin – credit Nephron, CC BY-SA 3.0

Source: Good News Network