The Detective study: detection and analysis of disease-driving T and B cell responses in tissues of patients with autoimmune disease for development of cell depletive treatment

In the Detective project the Radboud university medical center, the Radboud university, Reumanederland, and the companies Glaxo Smith Kline, Galapagos, Xenikos and Imaginab have collaborated to develop novels tools to develop better treatments for autoimmune diseases.  

This is relevant since many people suffer from autoimmune diseases. While treatment of some diseases has improved, this is not the case for others. Most patients cannot be cured and suffer from lifelong disease, frequently from a young age.  

The concept of this project was that curative treatments lack because it is very hard to detect from which lymph nodes autoimmune diseases are caused in individual persons, and inside those lymph nodes it is hard to identify the disease causing cells. If better tools are developed to detect and analyse these disease-causing cells this can be used to develop treatments that can eradicate these cells. 

We focussed on two autoimmune diseases: systemic sclerosis and Sjögren's syndrome. Patients suffer from very different symptoms, so we expected to find differences in the disease causing cells, and therefore differences in the effects of drugs.  

Firstly, nano-particles have been made that can be used to detect these disease-causing cells. Second, specialized PET scans have been successfully used to visualize reactive lymph nodes and inflamed tissues in patients. It has been possible to use these scans to obtain lymph node cells and cells from inflamed tissues with an ultrasound-guided biopsy from study participants. We have developed new techniques to distinguish and analyze the disease-causing cells in these lymph node cells. We also successfully investigated whether certain candidate drugs could disable these cells. The results of the research will be used to conduct further research into candidate drugs for these diseases. Some tools will be further developed as tests to improve disease diagnosis and monitoring.