Russian Databases Aim to Personalize Treatment for Autoimmune Diseases
Digital data repositories could help pharmaceutical companies speed up the development of more effective medicines.
Databases created in Russia could help doctors tailor therapy for patients with dermatomyositis and lupus by taking into account individual patient characteristics, while also accelerating drug development, researchers at Sechenov University said.
Dermatomyositis and systemic lupus erythematosus are autoimmune disorders in which the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues, the researchers explained. Standard medications for these conditions often carry serious side effects and suppress the immune system. Developing new drugs is also challenging because patients show wide variation in clinical and immunological characteristics. To address this problem, scientists created two specialized databases.
Help for Treatment and Drug Development
According to Boris Kireev, a researcher at the Center for Mathematical Modeling in Drug Development at Sechenov University, scientists building a mathematical model of dermatomyositis decided to “compile all available clinical trial data and characterize cytokine concentrations across the entire patient population.”
One digital repository therefore includes information on plasma levels of 19 cytokines in patients, along with data on creatine kinase, C-reactive protein, disease duration, and disease-specific autoantibodies.
The database dedicated to systemic lupus erythematosus therapy includes information from 39 randomized controlled trials, including the dynamics of more than 10 treatment efficacy indicators, patient demographic characteristics, and laboratory parameters. Researchers say these datasets could accelerate the development of new medicines and help doctors treat severe autoimmune diseases more effectively.
