Measuring response to immune stimuli in patients with CTD
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Measuring response to immune stimuli in patients with connective tissue disease
IRAS ID
183507
Contact name
John A Reynolds
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Connective tissue diseases (CTDs) are a complex group of conditions in which the body’s immune system becomes overactive. It is likely that the immune system response is different in each individual. Currently we treat patients who have similar symptoms as having the same disease even though the immune system may be working in very different ways in different people. We hope that by better understanding how patients’ and healthy people’s immune systems respond to testing in the laboratory, we can start to group patients together differently.
We want to see how the immune system in patients with a CTD respond to a stimulus and whether this is different between different patients. We also want to see whether we can freeze immune cells from patients to be used in laboratory experiments at a later date. We will compare the laboratory results to some of the details about their illness, medications or other blood tests. Finally we will test whether adding drugs to the blood or cell samples changes how they behave in these experiments.
REC name
South Central - Berkshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/SC/0515
Date of REC Opinion
13 Aug 2015
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion