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Arthritis and Immunology Research Program

Meet the scientists in this program

Lupus Family Registry and Repository

Clinical Immunology Laboratory

Myositis Testing Laboratory

Molecular and Immunology Protocols

The Arthritis and Immunology Research Program, headed by John B. Harley, M.D., Ph.D., concentrates upon the immunology and genetics of the inflammatory rheumatic diseases, especially systemic lupus erythematosus, familial Mediterranean fever, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren’s syndrome, scleroderma, ankylosing spondylitis, Wegener’s granulomatosis, dermato-myositis and polymyositis. These are human diseases, and the program has a distinctly human emphasis.

The program approaches the study of immunological disorders from a basic biomedical perspective with various methods involving molecular biology, genomics, molecular genetics, cellular immunology and cellular biology. One major approach is to study disease at the structural level of autoantibody and autoantigen. Other approaches include the application of “gene chip” technology and the use of modern genetics to identify gene expression changes and susceptibility genes for a variety of clinical disease situations. The program houses the Lupus Family Registry and Repository, a national collection of materials from families with two or more members suffering from lupus. The 500-plus families in the OMRF collection have played a pivotal role in establishing 15 of the 18 known genetic linkages in lupus.

The program uses a multidisciplinary approach to understand the rheumatic inflammatory diseases at their most fundamental level. This understanding will hopefully lead to the identification of possible etiologies and important new insights into the pathogenesis and mechanisms of these and other related disorders.