Team:UC San Diego/Description

Alaive

DESCRIPTION

Project Inspiration and Description

Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic disease that can occur at any stage of a person’s life, but majorly affects middle aged individuals. This autoimmune disease targets joints, causes inflammation, bone erosion, joint deformities, and painful swelling. In addition, it is linked to cardiovascular diseases, lymphoma, and anemia. Rheumatoid arthritis affects over 1.3 million Americans and as much as 1% of the worldwide population. Women are more likely to develop the disease at a younger age than men, and generally begins to affect people between the ages of 30 and 60 years old [1]. We hope that we can develop an innovative approach to better understand autoimmune diseases. Moreover, we are inspired by the computational workflow that will be incorporated into this research, and can also be used in researching other autoimmune diseases or other diseases that have a heterogeneous phenotype, such as cancer.

Because rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic disease, the major treatments currently available are medications that aim to suppress pain, inflammation, and degradation of joints and bones. The three main types of drugs that are prescribed to rheumatoid arthritis patients are non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents (NSAIDs), corticosteroids, and disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs). Physical and occupational therapy are also provided options to arthritis patients. Additionally in recent years, there have been a rise of and improvements made to devices that aid arthritis patients in performing daily tasks, such as specialized eating utensils. In the case where the arthritis is too severe to be suppressed by medications, surgical procedures including tendon repair, joint fusion, and total joint replacement, are available options to the patient [2]. While familiarizing ourselves with the current treatments for rheumatoid arthritis, we realized that the patient experience must be improved. Due to the uniqueness of each patient’s immune system, drug dosages vary and the body’s response time to the medication varies from several weeks to monthsThis procedure is financially and time consuming to both doctors and their patients.

We propose a paradigm shift towards personalizing the diagnosis process that would eradicate the trial-and-error-like procedure doctors and patients must go through when determining which treatments to proceed with. Because T-cells are the main immune cells responsible for attacking the joint cells, we plan to utilize the phage display method to run known drugs on T-cells collected from healthy patients. Our proposal would target the most effective set of antibodies that cause T-cell suppression and generate sequences from these antibodies to serve as a screening. Once we obtain sequences from the antibodies, we will be using SynBio to construct our antibodies from a commercial platform. We hope that these engineered antibodies will serve as a better alternative to the traditional flow cytometry based profiling of immune cells’ states, which are based on known individual cell surface proteins.

References

  • [1] https://www.rheumatoidarthritis.org/ra/facts-and-statistics/
  • [2] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/rheumatoid-arthritis/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20353653
  • [3] https://www.hopkinsarthritis.org/arthritis-info/rheumatoid-arthritis/ra-treatment/