| Description of work: This ESR will focus on biomarkers of innate immunity. Recent collaborative work of the WWU and UMCU demonstrated that S100A8 and S100A9 are reliable markers of disease activity in chronic inflammatory disorders in children especially in systemic and non-systemic forms of JIA. The ESR will perform serum analyses for these proteins with already established in-house assays. Two major questions will be the early diagnosis of systemic JIA patients in comparison with other causes of fever of unknown origin and the definition of inflammatory remission in JIA patients on medication. WWU disposes of biological samples from different biobanks including samples from auto-inflammatory syndromes, longitudinal samples of systemic JIA patients, an inception cohort of newly-diagnosed patients with JIA, and JIA patients on/of biologic medications. The ESR will develop and validate commercial assays for quantification of S100A8 and S100A9 in the indications described above. In cooperation with the UMCU we will incorporate our biomarkers in their multi-panel system. Regarding expression of S100-proteins in inflammation there is already an ongoing cooperation with WP3 (M. Schäfers, EIMI, WWU) in which we evaluate these S100-proteins as targets for optical imaging and PET in vivo. The ESR will also characterize the phagocytic compartment in the peripheral blood of JIA patients and focus on the presence of specific pro- and anti-inflammatory subpopulations of monocytes by FACS analysis.Personal Information Sheet ESR05 – David PoppPresentation ESR05 David Popp |
