This is an unusual time, and this year’s LEAP reflects it well: we start with Covid-19’s very sickest patients, and a Hopkins-wide team’s groundbreaking efforts to illuminate an unusual response in their immune system.
We end with a remarkable patient with a rare autoimmune disease: the legendary musician, Peter Frampton, who is not only raising awareness and research funding, but changing medical advice about how to preserve muscle function.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant disruptions to ANCA vasculitis patient care, but these patients are not at higher risk for COVID-19 than the general population, despite receiving immunosuppressive therapy.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins identified “hot spots” in the Topo protein that are targeted by the immune system in scleroderma patients with different genetic backgrounds, which may help us understand why the immune system attacks healthy tissues in this autoimmune disease.
Any builder will tell you that strength lies in the crosspieces, where framework or walls intersect.
This issue of LEAP celebrates intersections: between clinicians and biological scientists, between both of those groups and information scientists, between specialists of different disciplines.
Hopkins researchers found that dermatomyositis patients with anti-Mi2 antibodies have more severe muscle disease but demonstrate improvement in muscle strength after treatment.
In this study, nearly half of patients that developed inflammatory arthritis after being treated with cancer immunotherapy still had active arthritis 6 months after their last immunotherapy treatment.
