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Arthritis and Immunology Research Program

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Governor declares April Sjögren’s syndrome awareness month in Oklahoma

Harley named to the Association of American Physicians

OMRF research finds new cystic fibrosis gene

John B. Harley, M.D., Ph.D. Member and Program Chair, Arthritis and Immunology Research   Program George Lynn Cross Research Professor, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences     Center Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Oklahoma Health   Sciences Center Adjunct Professor, Departments of Microbiology and Pathology, University of   Oklahoma Health Sciences Center Staff Physician, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Oklahoma   City

Everyone knows that people can be self-destructive.  Our daily lives are punctuated by many examples of individuals and organizations acting in ways that do not appear to encourage their well being, if not even their mere survival.  This dichotomy of life and death, of survival and destruction, also operates in organ systems of our body.  The immune system generates antibodies and cells that defend us against certain cancers and all manner of infections, and it sometimes becomes self destructive by erroneously deciding that some structure of ourselves should be destroyed.  This leads to what scientists now call the autoimmune diseases.  They include a form of diabetes, most thyroid disease found in our society, a perplexing and potentially fatal disease called systemic lupus erythematosus, and the more ordinary lupus that most frequently affects young women in their child-bearing years.

The Harley laboratory has been working to find the causes of lupus since arriving in Oklahoma 23 years ago.  As knowledge is power, learning the cause of lupus would help facilitate the discovery of prevention strategies and of more effective and safer treatments.  In his research, John Harley and colleagues have taken two major approaches to this problem.

Harley and his colleagues, especially Judi James, used the antibodies that made this an autoimmune disease to trace the history of the self-destructive immune response back in time to before it began.  They found evidence that the body's defense against a common virus, called Epstein-Barr virus (this virus also causes "mono") interacts with the immune system in a way that leads to the self-destructive immune response characteristic of lupus.

Genetic composition of the lupus patient is the other "cause" of lupus.  This disease concentrates in families in a way that strongly suggests that many genes are important.  by developing a collection of 500 families containing two or more lupus patients and then studying how their DNA is different from people who do not develop lupus, the Harley lab obtained evidence for more than 20 genetic effects that contribute to the development of lupus and contributed to identifying three of them.  Knowing these genes and the viral cause of lupus will transform our understanding of this disease, and thereby accelerate the development of safe and efficacious preventive strategies and treatments.