2021

This November, Milena Pavlović and Lonneke Scheffer, PhD students in the group of prof. Geir Kjetil Sandve at the Department of Informatics (UiO) published their computational framework Immune ML in Nature Machine Intelligence. ImmuneML is a freely available tool that allows researchers to tackle complex computational questions related to studies of adaptive immune receptor repertoires. This tool will be an important resource for all studies that link B cell receptor and T cell receptor sequence data to antigen recognition and disease. For celiac disease, this represents one step closer towards the goal of detecting genes of gluten specific T cells directly in blood. 

Transglutaminase 2 (TG2) activity is essential to induce a pathogenic immune response towards gluten in coeliac disease. In a Phase 2 clinical trial, a daily dose of an irreversible TG2-inhibitor prevented gluten-induced mucosal destruction in coeliac patients that consumed gluten daily for 6 weeks. These findings represents a milestone in the search for treatment options for patients with coeliac disease. 

Proteomics analysis of intestinal tissue biopsies finds that some patients with celiac disease considered to be well treated by regular gluten free diet have ongoing low-level inflammation in the intestine suggestive of ongoing low-level anti-gluten immunity. These patients developed strong intestinal response following 14 -day gluten challenge. We are now investigating whether some patients may still have activated gluten-specific T-cells despite long-term gluten free diet.