New genomics center to focus on RA, lupus

A $5.6 million grant from The Tow Foundation will enable the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York to establish a genomics center for studying rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, according to a hospital press release.

“Our goals are to use genomic approaches to understand the regulation and function of disease-associated genes, understand how disease-associated genetic variants contribute to disease and identify new genes associated with autoimmune diseases,” Lionel B. Ivashkiv, MD, the hospital’s associate chief scientific officer who will serve as director of the Hospital for Special Surgery Genomics Center, said in the release. “We will use this new knowledge to develop more effective and personalized therapies.”

Lionel B. Ivashkiv

In the past 20 years, scientists have developed therapies for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) after discovering proteins, including tumor necrosis factor and interleukin-6, associated with the diseases.

“We are very excited to try to understand how genes involved in lupus and rheumatoid arthritis are regulated, because it would represent a new way to drive therapy,” Ivashkiv said. “It is called epigenetic therapy, meaning therapy targeted around how the environment controls genetic expression and thus the environmental causes of disease.”

Hospital for Special Surgery has more than 30 rheumatologists who treat 2,600 RA patients and 300 patients with SLE, the release said.

The genomics center’s goal is to develop more effective treatments with fewer side effects, and researchers anticipate testing new therapeutics in animal models by the grant’s fourth year, according to the release. The center will have an estimated 20 scientists and will recruit four genomics fellows. Staff will collaborate with scientists at the New York Genome Center, which houses genome sequencing machines.