Rheumatoid Arthritis

Through the study of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and focusing on the earliest phases of disease, the Autoimmunity team is working to understand how autoimmunity develops and progresses at the molecular and cellular level. Their hypothesis is that key immunological events in autoimmune pathogenesis occur when patients break immune tolerance, long before clinically recognizable signs of disease appear. Furthermore, they believe that the disease’s course could potentially be modified with early intervention to reshape immune tolerance, thereby preventing immune-mediated destruction of tissues. This team is using single cell multi-omic approaches to study the complexity of the immune response and identify mechanisms regulating autoimmune pathogenesis. Through the study of samples from untreated individuals, patients successfully treated with immunomodulatory drugs or treatment failures, healthy control subjects, and patients with specific genetic diseases, they hope to gain translational insights into approaches that modify tolerance and guide therapeutic intervention.