Adam Lacy-Hulbert, PhD, was reading through the latest scientific papers when one finding stopped him in his tracks: Groups from Kyoto University and Mount Sinai described an autoantibody specific to people with ulcerative colitis (UC). A telltale sign of autoimmune disease, autoantibodies are evidence that the body is making proteins that attack its own tissues. This caught his attention for two reasons.
“First, the autoantibodies seemed to be attacking a group of proteins called Alpha-V integrins, which I’ve studied for 25 years,” Dr. Lacy-Hulbert says. “And second, the autoantibody was present as much as a decade before people were actually diagnosed with UC.”
He quickly looped in James Lord, MD, PhD, a fellow investigator in BRI’s Gut Immunity Program who is also a gastroenterologist. They started examining samples from BRI’s biorepository, and within days, they found the same autoantibody. This launched new research questions such as: Can we target this autoantibody to stop UC before it starts?
