Shanghai researchers have helped identify
new genetic regions involved in rheumatoid arthritis that will shed light on
medicines that could be effective in treating the disease.
Professor Xu Huji and colleagues from the
Second Military Medical University, Shanghai, worked with other groups from
around the world to identify 42 new genetic regions involved in the disease,
bringing the total known to be involved to 101.
It is believed that 65 per cent of the risk
of rheumatoid arthritis is genetic.
The research involved several thousand
Chinese rheumatoid arthritis patients and is the largest such genetic study in
the world and the first in Han Chinese.
The study, to be published in Nature and in Arthritis
and Rheumatism, has nearly doubled the number of regions of the
genome associated with the disease.
The researchers identified several genes
that are already targets of approved treatments for other diseases, including
cancer treatments. These drugs could now potentially be repurposed for
rheumatoid arthritis treatment.
They showed that existing rheumatoid
arthritis drugs only target 30 of those genes, meaning a large number of
potential new drug targets can now be investigated.
Source: University of Queensland News
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