Highlights of the 14^th international symposium on Sjögren's syndrome

TY - JOUR

T1 - Highlights of the 14th international symposium on Sjögren's syndrome

AU - Bombardieri, M.

AU - Baldini, C.

AU - Alevizos, I.

AU - Akpek, E.

AU - Baer, A. N.

N1 - Funding Information: This session provided a broad over view on the ongoing international research collaborative projects. R. Seror (Paris, France) described “NECESSITY”, a project of the innovative medicines initiative for the development of sensitive and validated clinical endpoints in pSS. She explained the three objectives of the project: a) to develop and assess sensitive clinical endpoints for use in clinical trials to evaluate response to drugs; b) to identify and evaluate discriminative biomarkers for SS stratification; c) to set-up and perform a clinical trial to validate the newly defined SS endpoints and the identified biomarkers. A.G. Tzioufas (Athens, Greece) pre sented “HARMONICSS” the ongoing research project that received funding from the European’s Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Pro gramme and is aimed at creating an International Network and Alliance of partners and cohorts, entrusted with the mission of addressing the unmet needs in primary SS. Starting from a conceptual step-wise categorisation of SS clinical, histologic, and molecular stratification, the vision of HARMON-ICSS was presented highlighting the key point of data harmonisation as a tool to eliminate the discrepancies between centres in terms of ontology and content, and create a platform with open standards and tools, designed to enable secure storage, governance, analytics, access control and controlled sharing of information at multiple levels along with methods to make results of analyses and outcomes comparable across centres and sustainable through Rheumatology scientific associations. Two final late-breaking abstracts closed this session. The first was presented by I.L.A. Bodewes (Rotterdam, The Netherlands). She and her research team explored whether stratification of patients in the JOQUER study [hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) versus placebo for pSS] based upon their expression of IFN signature genes may result in an improvement on ESSDAI and ESSPRI with HCQ in the IFN positive patient group compared to the IFN negative patients and the placebo group. The results demonstrated that the mentioned stratification did not reveal an improvement of ESSPRI or ESSDAI scores with HCQ in either subgroup. However, treatment with HCQ for 24 weeks decreased systemic IFN activation and reduced expression of IFN-inducible RNA and DNA sensors in the cytosol showing that HCQ affected the known pathways in the pSS patients. These data suggested the involvement of other pathways than the IFN pathway in the induction of dryness, pain and fatigue in pSS. The second was presented by B.M. Warner (Baltimore, USA). He de scribed a large cohort of 16 patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI; e.g. pembrolizumab, nivolumab, ipilimumab) for neoplastic disease who developed salivary gland hypofunction. Results from multiple avenues of analysis suggested that ICIs may elicit profound negative effects on salivary secretion potentially breaking immune tolerance locally leading to activation of cytotoxic T cells, cytolysis, and cytokine secretion, in a nonclassic autoimmune fashion, at least like the one observed in SS.

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

KW - Sjögren's syndrome

KW - Symposium

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85055615435&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85055615435&partnerID=8YFLogxK

M3 - Article

C2 - 30156541

AN - SCOPUS:85055615435

SN - 0392-856X

VL - 36

SP - S3-S13

JO - Clinical and experimental rheumatology

JF - Clinical and experimental rheumatology

ER -