A research team from Department of Epidemiology and Health Statistics, School of Public Health, AHMU has recently published their research article in a leading journal Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases. The article was entitled Identification of new susceptibility loci associated with rheumatoid arthritis. Dr. Leng Ruixue, a young scholar and teacher working in Prof. Ye Dongqing’s team at Inflammatory-Immune Diseases Lab of Anhui Province, is the first author and Prof. Ye the corresponding author.
The study was supported by National high-level Talent Special Support Plan-Leading Talent Program, and the computing platform of the Health Statistics processing center in School of Public Health. By integrating multiple rheumatoid arthritis (RA) genome-wide association studies together with bioinformatics data, the researchers have found three new susceptible loci ( IL12RB2, CCR2 and IQGAP1) and two more suspects （TCF7and PLCL1）. With analysis and experimentation on mutation and gene function, they further proved the validity of their research, suggesting these newly-discovered loci could serve as the targets for RA drug therapy.
Autoimmune diseases，such as rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus，have been a long-term research focus for Prof. Ye’s team. This article marks their latest achievement in the field, following their earlier work acknowledged by a first prize of the Chinese Medical Science Prize in 2019and a paper published in the British Medical Journal in 2015.