Constantin Polychronakos
The Research Institute of the McGill Health Centre, Canada
Title: Personalised medicine in autoimmune disease: Type 1 diabetes as a paradigm
Biography
Biography: Constantin Polychronakos
Abstract
Recent advances in genome-wide association studies have generated hopes of better understanding of pathogenic processesrnof disease and more importantly, how it varies among diff erent individuals to explain responders vs. non-responders andrnuse this information to individualise therapeutics. However, germ line genetics have yielded variants of typically very smallrneff ect sizes (outside HLA), which, to date; have failed to convincingly predict response to various interventions. Autoimmunityrnis a special case because it is due to unchecked proliferation of a relatively small number of lymphocyte clones and morernimportantly, these clones can be distinguished from the rest of lymphocytes of the same type because they carry T-cell receptorsrnthat specifically recognise antigen. Moreover, these cells behave aberrantly for some reason that should be sought in their clonalrngenome and epigenome and is not necessarily present in the epigenome of the rest of the lymphocytes. I will present work onrnT-cells specifi cally isolated from the blood of children newly diagnosed with type-1 diabetes to highlight specifi c properties ofrnthe TCR rearrangements and the rest of the auto-reactive T-cell genome.