An Immunological Toolkit for Clinical Application

类风湿性关节炎(RA)患者患有关节疼痛和僵硬，关节受损导致执行日常任务的能力降低。虽然这些都是这种疾病最明显的特征，但这种疾病的根本原因在于人类的免疫系统。目前，我们还不完全了解导致类风湿性关节炎的免疫异常，但如果我们了解了，这将有助于我们更好地管理疾病。这将变得更容易做出诊断，以及确定患者是否？S RA未来可能会损害他们的关节。也许最重要的是，它将帮助我们设计更好的药物来对抗这种疾病，并更好地使用现有的药物。我们真正希望能够做的是为每个患者决定最合适的药物，而更好地了解免疫异常也将在这方面有所帮助。因此，我们的计划是详细研究RA患者的免疫系统。这将包括从患者身上提取血液，并对他们的白细胞进行一系列高级实验室测试。我们将把我们获得的结果与健康个体对疫苗的反应的免疫变化进行比较？期望有些是相同的，有些是不同的。我们的工作分为三个阶段，在这三个阶段中，我们计划慢慢地回家？在简单的实验室测试中，这将使我们能够测量RA患者的免疫系统发生了什么。这项工作的一个令人兴奋的方面是，与RA相关的东西也可能与其他疾病(糖尿病、多发性硬化症、哮喘)和器官移植患者有关。因此，我们的结果可能会产生广泛的影响，而不仅仅是改善类风湿关节炎患者的护理

Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) suffer with joint pain and stiffness, and joint damage which leads to a reduced ability to carry out everyday tasks. Although these are the most obvious features of the disease, the root cause of the disease lies within the human immune system. At the moment we don?t fully understand the immune abnormalities that lead to RA but, if we did, this should help us to manage the disease better. It would become easier to make a diagnosis, as well as to determine whether a patient?s RA is likely to damage their joints in the future. Perhaps most importantly it would help us to design better drugs to combat the disease, and to better use the drugs that already exist. Something that we would really like to be able to do is to decide the most appropriate drug for each patient and a better understanding of the immune abnormalities would also help here.Therefore our plans are to study, in detail, the immune system of patients with RA. This will involve taking blood from patients and running a panel of advanced laboratory tests on their white blood cells. We will compare the results we obtain with the immune changes in healthy individuals responding to a vaccine ? expecting some to be the same and some to be different. Our work is in three phases and, during the phases, we plan to slowly ?home in? on simple laboratory tests that will allow us to measure what is happening to the immune system in patients with RA. An exciting aspect of the work is that what is relevant to RA may also relate to other diseases (diabetes, multiple sclerosis, asthma) and to patients with an organ transplant. Therefore our results could have wide-ranging influence beyond improving the care of patients with RA