This review focuses on the molecular pathogenesis of Type 1 diabetes (T1D), specifically on the key autoantigens targeted by the autoimmune response and the clinical implications of their epitope specificity. T1D is characterized by the destruction o...
The majority of patients diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have developed autoantibodies against neoepitopes in proteins that have undergone post-translational modification, e.g., citrullination or carbamylation. There is growing evidence of t...
Sjögren’s syndrome (SjS) is characterized by lymphocytic infiltration and the dysfunction of the salivary and lacrimal glands. The autoimmune response is driven by the effector T cells and their cytokines. The activation of the effector he...
Central tolerance is provided by the autoimmune regulator (AIRE) expressing medullary thymic epithelial cells through high-avidity recognition of self-antigens. Peripheral mechanisms regulate adaptive immunity by deleting autoreactive T-cells that es...
Background and Objectives: Sjögren’s disease (SjD) is a chronic autoimmune disorder in which the immune system attacks the glands that produce tears and saliva, leading to symptoms such as dry eyes and dry mouth. If left untreated, SjD can...
Background: COVID-19 is a heterogenous disease resulting in long-term sequela in predisposed individuals. It is not uncommon that recovering patients endure non-respiratory ill-defined manifestations, including anosmia, and neurological and cognitive...
Autoantigen treatment has been tried for the prevention of type 1 diabetes (T1D) and to preserve residual beta-cell function in patients with a recent onset of the disease. In experimental animal models, efficacy was good, but was insufficient in hum...
Wet age-related macular degeneration (wAMD) is a chronic inflammation-associated neurodegenerative disease affecting the posterior part of the eye in the aging population. Aging results in the reduced functionality of cells and tissues, including the...
Autoantigens, targets of B cell antibodies, account for ~10% of the human proteome. It is not well understood why or how particular self-proteins become autoantigens. Prominent theories posit that failures of the immune system at various levels or ex...
Islet autoantibodies predict type 1 diabetes (T1D) but can be transient in murine and human T1D and are not thought to be directly pathogenic. Rather, these autoantibodies signal B cell activity as antigen-presenting cells (APCs) that present islet a...
Published hypervariable region V-beta T cell receptor (TCR) sequences were collected from people with severe COVID-19 characterized by having various autoimmune complications, including blood coagulopathies and cardiac autoimmunity, as well as from p...
Currently, we have a limited understanding of mechanisms leading to systemic lupus erythematosus, but we know that genetics, environmental factors, and epigenetics contribute to the disease. One common aspect of the various environmental triggers is...
According to the literature, the autoantigen La is involved in Cap-independent translation. It was proposed that one prerequisite for this function is the formation of a protein dimer. However, structural analyses argue against La protein dimers. Not...
This study reports the use of single-cell RNA sequencing to evaluate B cells in the peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and intrathyroidal blood mononuclear cells of patients with Graves’ disease (GD) undergoing thyroidectomy. These cells were...
Islet autoantibodies are the primary biomarkers used to predict type 1 diabetes (T1D) disease risk. They signal immune tolerance breach by islet autoantigen-specific B lymphocytes. T-B lymphocyte interactions that lead to expansion of pathogenic T ce...
The function of ribosome binding protein 1 (RRBP1) is regulating the transportation and secretion of some intracellular proteins in mammalian cells. Transcription of RRBP1 is induced by various cytokines. However, few studies focused on the process o...
Fibrillary glomerulonephritis (FGN) is an uncommon glomerular deposition disease characterized by randomly oriented, nonbranching fibrils that are usually Congo-red-negative and larger than amyloid fibrils on electron microscopy. The discovery of DNA...
Thymus plays a fundamental role in central tolerance establishment, especially during fetal life, through the generation of self-tolerant T cells. This process consists in T cells education by presenting them tissue-restricted autoantigens promiscuou...
Comorbidities in tuberculosis patients are increasing annually. Autoimmune pathology may influence the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis (TB). However, the molecular mimicry between Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) and human autoantigens is an...
Since the first description of nuclear autoantigens in the late 1960s and early 1970s, researchers, including ourselves, have found it difficult to establish monoclonal antibodies (mabs) against nuclear antigens, including the La/SS-B (Sjögrens&...
Autoimmune bullous diseases (AIBDs), which are a group of tissue-specific autoimmune diseases of the skin, present with various blistering lesions on the skin and mucous membranes, and show autoantibodies of IgG, IgA and IgM against epidermal cell su...
Type-1-diabetes (T1D) is a multifactorial disorder with a global incidence of about 8.4 million individuals in 2021. It is primarily classified as an autoimmune disorder, where the pancreatic β-cells are unable to secrete sufficient insulin. Thi...
Psoriasis is classically considered a chronic inflammatory skin disorder, however the identification of autoantigens in its pathogenesis established it as a T cell mediated autoimmune disease. As such professional antigen-presenting cells (APCs) are...
Decades ago, we and many other groups showed a nucleo-cytoplasmic translocation of La protein in cultured cells. This shuttling of La protein was seen after UV irradiation, virus infections, hydrogen peroxide exposure and the Fenton reaction based on...
Neutrophils are an essential part of the innate immune system and the first line of defense against invading pathogens. They phagocytose, release granular contents, produce reactive oxygen species, and form neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) to fi...
Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin disease, the immunologic model of which has been profoundly revised following recent advances in the understanding of its pathophysiology. In the current model, a crosstalk between keratinocytes, neutrophils,...
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains a leading global health concern, with atherosclerosis being its principal cause. Standard CVD treatments primarily focus on mitigating cardiovascular (CV) risk factors through lifestyle changes and cholesterol-low...
While over the past decades T cells have been considered key players in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis (MS), it has only recently become evident that B cells have a major contributing role. Our understanding of the role of B cells has evolved...
Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory autoimmune skin disease significantly impairing the patients’ quality of life. Keratin (K)14 and K17 are abnormally expressed in psoriasis patients and considered to be potential autoantigens triggering this...
The 78 kDa glucose-regulated protein (GRP78), a member of the 70 kDa heat-shock family of molecular chaperones (HSP70), is essential for the regulation of the unfolded protein response (UPR) resulting from cellular endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress....
Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is an autoimmune disease characterized by specific autoantibodies, vasculopathy and fibrosis of the skin and internal organs. In SSc, chronic activation of the immune system is largely sustained by endogenous inflammatory med...
Following fifteen years of research, neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) are widely reported in a large range of inflammatory infectious and non-infectious diseases. Cumulating evidences from in vitro, in vivo and clinical diagnostics suggest that...
Background/Objectives: Chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) is characterized by almost daily wheals or angioedema lasting for more than six weeks and not attributable to a defined inducing factor. CSU reportedly affects 1–2% of the general popul...
The thymus is widely recognized as an immunological niche where autoimmunity against the acetylcholine receptor (AChR) develops in myasthenia gravis (MG) patients, who mostly present thymic hyperplasia and thymoma. Thymoma-associated MG is frequently...
Background and Aims: C1q is an autoantigen in different autoimmune disorders, Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) and Lupus Nephritis (LN) among them. The two functional domains of C1q, the collagen-like region (CLR) and the globular head region (gC1q...
Cell Division Autoantigen 1 (CDA1) was discovered following screening a human expression library with serum from a patient with Discoid Lupus Erythematosus. CDA1, encoded by TSPYL2 on the X chromosome, shares anti-proliferative and pro‑fibrotic prope...
B cells have been strongly implicated in the development of human type 1 diabetes and are required for disease in the NOD mouse model. These functions are dependent on B cell antigen receptor (BCR) specificity and expression of MHC, implicating linke...
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic immune-mediated neurological disorder, characterized by progressive demyelination and neuronal cell loss in the central nervous system. Many possible causes of MS have been proposed, including genetic factors, env...
Cell Division Autoantigen 1 (CDA1) has been shown to play a role in enhancing transforming growth factor beta (TGFβ) signaling, leading to fibrosis in diabetic kidney disease (DKD) using mouse strains with global CDA1 gene deletion. In these mod...
It was recently shown that IgGs from sera of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients are active in the hydrolysis of DNA and myelin basic protein (MBP). We first analyzed the relative concentration of antibodies against five histones (H1, H2a, H2b, H3, and...
Chronic stimulation by infectious or self-antigens initiates subsets of monoclonal gammopathies of undetermined significance (MGUS), smoldering multiple myeloma (SMM), or multiple myeloma (MM). Recently, glucosylsphingosine (GlcSph) was reported to b...
Hypersensitivity reactions are dysregulated and potentially devastating immune responses, characterized by a tendency to become chronic. They target either self-proteins or harmless foreign proteins and are driven by both T and B cells. Although nume...
Background/Objectives: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a complex psychiatric disorder characterized by an extreme fear of gaining weight, leading to severe calorie restriction and weight loss. Beyond its psychiatric challenges, AN has significant physical c...
Immunotherapies aimed at preserving residual beta cell function in type 1 diabetes have been successful, although the effect has been limited, or raised safety concerns. Transient effects often observed may necessitate redosing to prolong the effect,...
Tissue-resident memory T cells (TRM) stay in the peripheral tissues for long periods of time, do not recirculate, and provide the first line of adaptive immune response in the residing tissues. Although TRM originate from circulating T cells, TRM are...
The anti-La mab 312B, which was established by hybridoma technology from human-La transgenic mice after adoptive transfer of anti-human La T cells, immunoprecipitates both native eukaryotic human and murine La protein. Therefore, it represents a true...
Our understanding of the immunopathological features of type 1 diabetes (T1D) has greatly improved over the past two decades and has shed light on disease heterogeneity dictated by multiple immune, metabolic, and clinical parameters. This may explain...
(1) Autoantibodies to the leucine variant of neuropeptide Y (NPY-LA) have been found in individuals with type 1 diabetes (T1D). We investigated the association between the levels of NPY-LA and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) to better understan...
The 80+ existing autoimmune disorders (ADs) affect billions with little prevention or treatment options, except for temporary symptomatic management, leading to enormous human suffering and a monumental financial burden. The autoantibodies formed in...
Vitiligo is an autoimmune skin disorder caused by dysfunctional pigment-producing melanocytes which are attacked by immune cells. Oxidative stress is considered to play a crucial role in activating consequent autoimmune responses related to vitiligo....
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