Determining the in vivo role of chronic inflammatory burden through quantification of the GlycA biomarker in a spectrum of inflammatory and immuno-depressed pathologies

A novel biomarker called GlycA is a summary measure for the concentration of specific inflammation-related glycoproteins and the degree to which they are acetylated; hence its name Glycoprotein Acetylation. Previous studies have shown that this biomarker is an excellent summary measure for chronic inflammatory burden: increased GlycA is associated with short term all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease risk, metabolic syndrome and disease severity of many inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. A mechanistic explanation for these associations has not yet been formulated, but a landmark study in 2015 showed GlycA's association to neutrophil-related gene expression. Our previous work predicted and then confirmed that GlycA was associated with disease severity in inflammatory bowel disease and lupus. This project builds on those observations and goes a step further: in lupus, it has been shown that neutrophil gene expression profiles can predict when quiescent patients are about to have a spike in disease activity called a flare. In a unique set of patient samples collected for a French Inserm study aimed at confirming neutrophil's relation to flares, we will test if GlycA has similar predictive power. Simultaneously, we want to deepen our understanding of GlycA by finding out why it is decreased in patients with parasitic cutaneous Leishmaniasis infection and if the marker can help predict the endstage disease caused by HTLV-1 retroviral infection.