A chemical reverse approach for autoimmune diseases diagnosis

An increasing number of individuals throughout the world is affected by autoimmune diseases, a large and diverse group of disorders that are categorized by tissue injury or pathology. Although the incidence and prevalence of individual autoimmune diseases are not high, the population burdens of the disease are large and underestimated. Thus, reliable diagnostic/prognostic tools are necessary for an early diagnosis and for monitoring disease activity. In this scenario, we proposed a ‘Chemical Reverse Approach’ based on the use of patients’ sera to screen synthetic modifi ed peptides. We showed that this approach could lead to the effective identifi cation of specifi c probes able to characterize highly specifi c autoantibodies as disease biomarkers of highly relevant autoimmune diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis and Rheumatoid Arthritis [1,2]. Toscana Biomarkers is a R&D company involved in the application of the “chemical reverse approach” to different autoimmune conditions for the development of innovative diagnostic/prognostic tests. As a number of autoimmune diseases have been associated with posttranslational modifi cations, which alter the function and immunogenicity of protein/peptide antigens, we are synthesizing and screening focused peptide libraries based on post-translational modifi ed amino acid, conformational and minimal epitope diversity. Lead compounds can be thus used as antigenic probes for specifi c recognition of autoantibodies as biomarkers of diseases in the set up of diagnostic/prognostic assays.