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Lupus is an incurable autoimmune disorder that primarily affects women. The form of the disease being studied, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), ``is an insidious and very difficult disease to deal with,'' said center director Dr. Edward Wakeland. ``It is caused by multiple genes, but little beyond that is known about the genetic basis for susceptibility to the disease.''
SLE can affect the joints, skin, kidneys, blood, heart, lungs and other internal organs. Patients may experience flare-ups of symptoms as well as periods of long remission.
Over the next five years, researchers in the center at UF's College of Medicine will employ a pioneering approach they developed to isolate the specific effects of four individual genes associated with the disease.
``Each element of this disease is caused by one of the genes we have found,'' said Wakeland. ``We've taken a complicated disease and broken it up into pieces so that each piece can be studied separately.''
The researchers have identified the position of each of the four genes in a mouse model. Through selective breeding, they have developed several strains of mice in which only one of the contributing genes appears.
``Instead of having one strain with all four of these genes, we now have four strains, each of which has only one of the genes,'' Wakeland said.
``We can study what each gene does by itself, which enables us to gain insights into the process by which this disease develops,'' he said. ``We can apply all of the technologies we have available for studying single genes, which are more powerful than technologies that can be applied to diseases that have many genes involved.''
Victoria White