The predictive value of antinuclear antibodies in patients with suspected connective tissue disease for the development of connective tissue diseases.

Objectives: Early confirmation of the diagnosis of connective tissue diseases (CTD) is important, as prolonged disease activity can result in irreversible organ damage. Although antinuclear antibodies (ANAs) have been shown to precede the diagnosis of SLE, this has not been investigated in large cohorts for other CTDs. In this study, we investigated whether the presence of antinuclear autoantibodies in undiagnosed patients suspected of having CTDs is predictive of development of a future CTD.

The latest development of the DELAD project for sharing corpora of speech disorders.

Corpora of speech of individuals with communication disorders (CSD) are invaluable resources for education and research, but they are costly and hard to build and difficult to share for various reasons. DELAD, which means 'shared' in Swedish, is a project initiated by Professors Nicole Müller and Martin Ball in 2015 that aims to address this issue by establishing a platform for researchers to share datasets of speech disorders with interested audiences. To date four workshops have been held, where selected participants, covering various expertise including researchers in clinical phonetics and linguistics, speech and language therapy, infrastructure specialists, and ethics and legal specialists, participated to discuss relevant issues in setting up such an archive.

Preferential HLA-B27 Allorecognition Displayed by Multiple Cross-Reactive Antiviral CD8 T Cell Receptors.

T cells provide essential immunosurveillance to combat and eliminate infection from pathogens, yet these cells can also induce unwanted immune responses via T cell receptor (TCR) cross-reactivity, also known as heterologous immunity. Indeed, pathogen-induced TCR cross-reactivity has shown to be a common, robust, and functionally potent mechanism that can trigger a spectrum of human immunopathologies associated with either transplant rejection, drug allergy, and autoimmunity. Here, we report that several virus-specific CD8 T cells directed against peptides derived from chronic viruses (EBV, CMV, and HIV-1) presented by high frequency HLA-A and -B allomorphs differentially cross-react toward HLA-B27 allotypes in a highly focused and hierarchical manner.

Infection with a virus generates a polyclonal immune response with broad alloreactive potential.

Virus-specific T cells have been shown to cross-react with allogeneic HLA (allo-HLA) at a clonal level. However, the impact of a single virus on the allorepertoire has never been investigated at the polyclonal level. We made an inventory of the incidence and specificity of allo-HLA-cross-reactive-virus-specific CD8 T cells in 24 healthy individuals.

Cross-Reactivity of Virus-Specific CD8+ T Cells Against Allogeneic HLA-C: Possible Implications for Pregnancy Outcome.

Heterologous immunity of virus-specific T cells poses a potential barrier to transplantation tolerance. Cross-reactivity to HLA-A and -B molecules has broadly been described, whereas responses to allo-HLA-C have remained ill defined. In contrast to the transplant setting, HLA-C is the only polymorphic HLA molecule expressed by extravillous trophoblasts at the maternal-fetal interface during pregnancy.