Autoimmunoprofiler

Our objective is to profile a range of autoimmune diseases using a combination of proteomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic, and structural analyses. Emphasis will be on freshly collected tissue samples with matched peripheral blood samples from select clinically well-annotated patients with autoimmune diseases. Overall goals include better understanding of underlying mechanisms of autoimmune diseases, identification of the relationship between tissue and peripheral compartment, and the identification of novel pathways and targets for future drug discovery and development.

Autoimmunoprofiler is envisioned to be a consortium effort. Eli Lilly and UCSF are the founding partners, with the expectation to engage additional partners in the future.

The program will initially prospectively collect samples from patients with the following autoimmune diseases: Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE), Scleroderma (SSc), primary Sjögren’s Syndrome (pSS), Ulcerative Colitis (UC), Crohn’s Disease (CD), and Type 1 Diabetes (T1D), and will be complemented by samples from matched healthy controls (HC). At the onset of the collaboration, parties agreed on a target number of individuals to be collected over the course of 2 years.

Partner

UC San Francisco scientists have formed a research alliance with pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly and Company aimed at better understanding autoimmune diseases and fostering the development of new therapies. Based on the innovative Immunoprofiler model launched at UCSF in 2015, the new initiative, called AutoImmunoprofiler, inherits the most successful aspects of its predecessor and adapts them to the study of autoimmunity.

With foundational funding from Lilly, AutoImmunoprofiler launches with the goal of bringing up to four additional pharmaceutical companies into the consortium. Like Lilly, all these partner investors will have access to research data generated from biological samples through standardized procedures developed in the high-tech CoLabs facilities at UCSF.