Abdominal pain, diarrhea, anemia, weight loss... all symptoms of Crohn’s disease. But the cause? It has eluded pathologists and clinicians since the illness was first described over a century ago. Now, researchers at Arizona State University and the Mayo Clinic have teamed up to create an autoantibody biomarker panel for the condition (1) – one that may not only help unveil new diagnostics for the condition, but possibly even pave the way to discovering its roots.
“There are currently no gold standard tests for the diagnosis and prognosis of Crohn’s disease,” says Joshua LaBaer, Director of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. “Delay in diagnosis – and misdiagnosis – postpones the initiation of appropriate treatment, and there is also a lack of means to distinguish between patients with aggressive or non-aggressive forms of the disease.” The current de facto methods of identifying the immunological disorder involve expensive equipment (MRI) or invasive surgical procedures (biopsy). The investigators believed there had to be a better way to serve patients and began searching for an efficient, noninvasive clinical tool to diagnose Crohn’s disease. The result? A novel system called NAPPA – nucleic acid programmable protein arrays – that profiles Crohn’s-associated autoantibodies against more than 1,900 blood-borne human proteins. After further validation by an ELISA, their results revealed a panel of IgA antibodies that could be used as a diagnostic test for Crohn’s disease.
It’s one of the first investigations to explore the immuno-proteomics of the disease, and the researchers are optimistic that the approach may shine a light on its cause. Moreover, the array can also be applied to other illnesses; LaBaer says, “We have already applied NAPPA in the study of many other diseases involving autoimmunity (type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis), cancers (breast and lung), neurodegeneration (Alzheimer’s disease), and infectious disease (tuberculosis).” “We hope our pilot study in Crohn’s disease will serve as a springboard to allow us to carry out a more comprehensive study,” says LaBaer, who hopes it will eventually lead to a product that can improve clinical management of patients.
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References
- H Wang et al., “Identification of antibody against SNRPB, small nuclear ribonucleoprotein-associated proteins B and B’, ad an autoantibody marker in Crohn’s disease using an immunoproteomics approach”, J Crohns Colitis, [Epub ahead of print] (2017). PMID: 28204086.
