- Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic inflammation of the joints which mostly affect women.
- The disease causing variants of the gene were focused for the treatment.
- Precision Medicine Approach shows promise for the treatment of autoimmune diseases.
Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease that commonly affects the joints. It approximately affects 3 million people in the world and is more prevalent among women.
Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic inflammation of the joints which can lead to severe disability. This may sometimes be in a more severe form resulting in vascular inflammation and internal organ damage that might lead to premature death.
The research study mainly focused on the disease causing variants of the gene which has been associated with rheumatoid arthritis.
Various experiments were conducted by using the cells obtained from the rheumatoid joints of the patients who either had a disease causing or a disease protective MIF gene.
Richard Bucala M.D., Yale Professor of Medicine said, "We showed that the presence of the high-expression risk variant led to more MIF production and to structural alterations in a cell surface protein that had long been associated with invasive cancers."
The study findings has shown the use of MIF inhibitors for rheumatoid arthritis in genetically susceptible patients. MIF inhibitors were developed for testing cancer and autoimmunity in the laboratory. Scientists were found to use these drugs along with inhibitors to suppress the invasive effect of MIF on rheumatoid joint cells.
The author also noted,"It's a precision-medicine approach to treating autoimmune disease," "Patients with a risk MIF genotype would be most effectively treated by such drugs."
Source-Medindia