Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is an immune disorder impacting as much as 4% of people worldwide, leading to painful and recurring skin lesions and inflammation, mainly found in skin folds. It predominantly affects women of African American heritage.
At Clemson University, a research team utilized an innovative multiomics approach to uncover crucial immune mechanisms associated with this chronic and disruptive inflammatory skin condition.
The research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), highlights a promising target for future treatments.
Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is an immune disease that affects up to 4% of the global population and causes painful, recurring skin lesions and inflammation, primarily in the folds of the skin. It commonly affects women of African American descent.
Shahid Mukhtar and his team, including Bharat Mishra, Nilesh Kumar, and graduate student YiFei Gou, applied single-cell sequencing methods to identify CD2 as a significant immune receptor that shows increased expression on T cells and innate lymphoid cells (ILCs), like natural killer cells, within skin tissue affected by HS.
In partnership with researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Mukhtar’s team conducted organotypic skin culture experiments sourced from HS patients. They found that inhibiting CD2 resulted in a notable decrease in the production of cytokines and chemokines, along with a reduction in critical pathogenic gene expressions.
This discovery indicates that targeting CD2 may effectively lower the inflammatory response in HS, offering a new potential treatment approach to alleviate symptoms and enhance the quality of life for patients.
Gou, who is passionate about deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence (AI), aims to further combine single-cell transcriptomics with global protein-protein interactions using context-aware AI. This methodology seeks to improve the understanding of cellular networks and the mechanisms of diseases, thereby advancing precision medicine for immune-affiliated conditions like HS.
“Our integrative strategy, merging single-cell information with molecular insights, reveals the remarkable potential of multiomics in identifying new therapeutic targets,” Mukhtar remarked. “These discoveries enrich our comprehension of HS and pave the way for the creation of targeted therapies for HS and other immune-related diseases.”
