Proteomics technologies for the study of autoimmune disease

Array-based autoantibody profiling may provide a long-awaited platform of technology to determine the specificity of autoimmune responses in individuals and cohorts of patients. We believe this technology will drive development and selection of antigen-specific therapies for use in the clinic. It is possible, in a manner parallel to the use of skin testing in the allergy clinic to select desensitization therapy, that antigen arrays could be applied to select customized antigen-specific therapy for individual patients with autoimmune disease. We anticipate that such an antigen array-based strategy will be initially utilized to develop therapies that could be used to treat patients with a specific autoimmune disease and to select patients to receive such therapies. Once antigen-specific therapies prove safe and effective, and if inclusion of the exact set of targeted autoantigens in the therapy proves crucial for efficacy in individual patients, then customized therapies based on selection of agents including the targeted autoantigens in individual patients could be developed in the coming decades.