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Observations #13
A set of ideas and observations from a week’s worth of work analyzing businesses and technologies.
Lupus and the power of the human immune system
Lupus in particular systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a pretty bad autoimmune disease. I have a personal connection to it — SLE’s complexity and heterogeneity make developing new medicines for it really hard. Promising drugs often fail in phase 2/3 because endpoints aren’t properly set, patient recruitment isn’t done properly, and targets aren’t well chosen.
In SLE, B-cells drive pathogenesis by activating autoreactive T-cells and secreting auto-antibodies that recognize nuclear targets (also known as antinuclear antibodies — ANA). These ANAs form complexes to activate Toll-like receptors (TLR) and other immune pathways to lead to inflammation and organ deterioration.
Genomic tools to read the immune systems has increased our ability to identify new targets for a wide set of diseases:
