Background: Immune-mediated arthritis is a group of autoinflammatory diseases, where the patient’s own immune system attacks and destroys synovial joints. Sustained remission is not always achieved with available immunosuppressive treatments, warranting more detailed studies of T cell responses that perpetuate synovial inflammation in treatment-refractory patients. Methods: In this study, we investigated CD4 + and CD8 + T lymphocytes from the synovial tissue and peripheral blood of patients with treatment-resistant immune-mediated arthritis using paired single-cell RNA and TCR-sequencing. To gain insights into the trafficking of clonal families, we compared the phenotypes of clones with the exact same TCRß amino acid sequence between the two tissues. Results: Our results show that both CD4 + and CD8 + T cells display a more activated and inflamed phenotype in the synovial tissue compared to peripheral blood both at the population level and within individual T cell families. Furthermore, we found that both cell subtypes exhibited clonal expansion in the synovial tissue. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the local environment in the synovium drives the proliferation of activated cytotoxic T cells, and both CD4 + and CD8 + T cells may contribute to tissue destruction and disease pathogenesis.
CITATION STYLE
Bhattacharya, D., Theodoropoulos, J., Nurmi, K., Juutilainen, T., Eklund, K. K., Koivuniemi, R., … Lönnberg, T. (2024). Single-cell characterisation of tissue homing CD4 + and CD8 + T cell clones in immune-mediated refractory arthritis. Molecular Medicine, 30(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s10020-024-00802-1
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