Plenge Lab
Date posted: April 14, 2013 | Author: | No Comments »

Categories: Drug Discovery Human Genetics Immunogenomics

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I prepared a lecture for immunology graduate students at Harvard Medical School on clinical features of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for the G1 IMM302qc class. 

The slide deck can be found here

A brief summary:

•Clinical characteristics and pathophysiology
•Differential diagnosis
•Exam and laboratory studies
•Treatment strategy
•Research opportunities
•Case presentations
 
The future research opportunities include using human genetics as an anchor for drug discovery in RA.  I briefly go over three strategies:
 

(1) “look-up” method – simple and suggestive but undisciplined (examples in RA: IL6R/tocilizumab, CTLA4/abatacept)

(2) “Allelic series” method – powerful but likely infrequent (example in other disease: PCSK9)

(3) “pathway” method – powerful and comprehensive but target ID difficult (example in RA: CD40 signaling; Gang Li et al, in press PLoS Genetics)

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