Featured Studies Highlight #5: Discoid Lupus in Veterans
STUDY TITLE: UNDERSTANDING ANTIMALARIAL RESISTANT DISCOID LUPUS
Study Overview:
While antimalarial resistant discoid lupus leads to extremely poor quality of life, there is not a good understanding of how it differs from antimalarial responsive lupus on a cellular level. Veterans with both forms of discoid lupus will be studied and compared to characterize key differences between these groups.
Study Purpose:
There is currently not a good scientific understanding of the cells and pathways leading to antimalarial nonresponsive discoid lupus erythematosus. These patients frequently require long-term use of immunosuppressives, and there are patients who are refractory to all available therapies and experience continued erythema, pain, and itch over extensive body surface areas that lead to extremely poor quality of life, with anxiety, depression, and suicidality. This project will allow an unbiased approach to understanding the cells and pathways responsible for disease in antimalarial nonresponsive disease, using mass cytometry and mRNA gene expression. This is an unexplored area that deserves systematic study, as outlined in this proposal. We will examine two groups of patients, those who respond to antimalarials and those who do not. This comparative study will allow characterization of key differences between these two groups.
Goals/Objective:
The short-term impact will be to define cellular and pathway differences in the antimalarial refractory discoid lupus patients. The long-term goal is to subset discoid lupus patients based on the findings and to perform studies with more targeted therapies in these refractory patients, using more appropriate subtyping based on tissue cellular and pathway heterogeneity. Long-term these studies will allow a more individualized approach to treatment.
Study Results:
Results from this study have not yet been reported.
How Does This Impact Veterans?:
Building a good understanding of antimalarial resistant discoid lupus will better treatment for veterans affected by it, and help target therapies to individualize treatment.
