Yanxia Guo, Alice M Walsh, Ursula Fearon, Malcolm D Smith, Mihir D Wechalekar, Xuefeng Yin, Suzanne Cole, Carl Orr, Trudy McGarry, Mary Canavan, Stephan Kelly, Tai-An Lin, Xuejun Liu, Susanna M Proudman, Douglas J Veale, Costantino Pitzalis, Sunil Nagpal
The inflammatory CD40-CD40L pathway is implicated in various autoimmune diseases, but the activity status of this pathway in various stages of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) progression is unknown. In this study, we used gene signatures of CD40L stimulation derived from human immature dendritic cells and naive B cells to assess the expression of CD40-downstream genes in synovial tissues from anti-citrullinated protein Ab-positive arthralgia, undifferentiated arthritis (UA), early RA, and established RA cohorts in comparison with healthy donors...
June 1, 2017: Journal of Immunology: Official Journal of the American Association of Immunologists