Drs. Mo Osman and Lisa Willis uncover new biological marker for scleroderma
8 January 2024
By Gillian Rutherford, Folio
A cross-disciplinary University of Alberta research team has uncovered a biological marker for scleroderma that can predict which patients will develop severe disease and could also lead to new treatments.
Scleroderma is a rare condition that affects about 17,000 people in Canada. An overproduction of collagen leads to a hardening of the skin, and in severe cases, blood vessels and internal organs are also affected. Approximately 40 per cent of patients die within five years of diagnosis.
Medication, diet and exercise may slow progression and ease symptoms, but there is no cure, and until now there has been no way to predict who will develop the most severe form of the disease.
In recently published research, the team found that polysialic acid is elevated in both the skin and blood of patients with systemic sclerosis and correlates with the level of fibrosis. Polysialic acid is a glycan, or sugar modification, on the surface of cells in the immune, reproductive and nervous systems, and is known to be associated with aggressive cancer cells as well.
“Scleroderma is a terrible disease that starts with debilitating fatigue and then leads to systemic scarring. Imagine basically feeling trapped in your own body,” says co-principal investigator Mo Osman, rheumatologist and immunologist and assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry.
“It’s key to identify those whose disease will progress because we want to be able to treat them early to minimize damage,” Osman says.
Co-principal investigator Lisa Willis, assistant professor in the Faculty of Science and an expert on glycans, developed the blood test for polysialic acid in her lab.
Also involved in this research were Robert Gniadecki (Professor, Division of Dermatology) and Jan Willem Cohen Tervaert (Professor, Division of Rheumatology)