Researchers from Strasbourg, as part of an international consortium, report the results of large-scale transcriptomic analyses conducted in the context of autoimmune muscle diseases:
- using in situ RNA sequencing, it was possible to identify transcriptomic signatures specific to certain autoantibodies,
- these were studied in particular in muscle biopsies from dermatomyositis (Mi2-positive) and scleroderma-overlapping myositis (PM/Scl-positive),
- several hundred muscle biopsies from various reference centres were analysed for this purpose,
- these signatures can be transferred to healthy human cells in culture and are capable of causing lesions similar to those observed in human pathology.
This work validates the hypothesis that the internalisation of autoantibodies plays a major role in triggering autoimmunity, particularly in inflammatory muscle diseases.
