Paving the way for more targeted lupus treatments

Carola Vinuesa, assistant research director and group leader of the Autoimmunity Laboratory at the Crick, and Honorary Professor at UCL,  has been awarded £3m to study how lupus develops, working with rheumatologist Anisur Rahman, Professor of Rheumatology at UCL.
   
Lupus is an autoimmune disease that causes inflammation in organs and joints, fatigue and skin rashes. Although some treatments are available, the variability of the condition means it’s very hard to know which patients will respond.

Carola is aiming to better understand the mechanisms of the disease by studying mice bred with rare genetic mutations that cause severe lupus in children. Her team will focus on immune cells called B cells, which trigger lupus causing the body to attack its own tissues. The team will compare the B cells in the mice to samples from patients being treated in hospital, and then test drugs which they believe could block the rogue B cells in both the mice and human samples.

“Treatments for lupus are usually a case of trial and error because we don’t fully understand the cause in different people. We hope to shed light on the different mechanisms using mice, and then validate this in people living with lupus, to test new medicines in a more targeted way”. Professor Carola Vinuesa.

“The technical ability of teams at the Crick combined with the clinical access to patients and expertise of doctors, will allow us to tackle a challenge that has been out of reach for a long time. The work at UCL will rest on the cohort of patients with LUPUS that was started in 1978 and has recruited more than 800 patients since then. Our detailed clinical and research phenotyping of these patients will allow validation of the data from mice at the Crick.” Professor Anisur Rahman,  Professor of Rheumatology, Division of Medicine UCL.

• Profile Professor Anisur Rahman
• Profile Professor Carola Vinuesa
• Department of Inflammation, Division of Medicine, UCL 
• Wellcome Discovery Awards