Diseases in which the body’s immune system attacks itself are increasing across the world with a major reason being the aging population. Both cancers and autoimmune diseases increase with age. Our lab group studies myasthenia gravis (MG). In this disease antibodies attack the nerve-muscle communication point and can produce life-threatening weakness. We were investigating patient samples in order to try find proteins that predict how patients do with treatment and accidentally discovered proteins increased in blood only of patients over 50. This later-onset group already was known to differ in biological measures from younger patients. Our discovery has the potential to define the reasons for this difference. However, we need to confirm that the changes we see are not related only to aging. The UK Biobank has an ideal large data set using the same protein detection method that we used (Olink) and would allow us to verify if the proteins detected are specific to myasthenia gravis changes or not. We expect that if verified we will understand the disease better and thereby develop better treatments focused on the late-onset form of the disease. Our discoveries may be relevant to other autoimmune diseases. Given that the data is already in existence we can complete our analysis in less than 6 months.
