Wed, 2013-04-17 15:25 | 
Abstract: Diagnosis of rare autoimmune diseases such as those affecting the liver and the bile ducts including primary biliary cirrhosis, autoimmune hepatitis and primary sclerosing cholangitis requires the accurate measurement and of disease-specific antibodies and more than 20 diagnostically relevant antibody tests are in current use. Conventional immunoassays such as indirect immunofluorescence, immunoblot or enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) are slow, laborious and may be difficult to interpret: all these factors have a negative impact on efficiency, resources, and ultimately, running costs. Moreover, none of the conventional assays is able to provide a vast amount of information in a single test. The diversity of disease’s appearance (asymptomatic, acute and fulminant presentations) and the absence of a precise, standardized, single diagnostic test implies that the diagnosis may be missed or misapplied and justify consideration for a diagnosis of autoimmune liver diseases in all patients with acute and chronic hepatitis of unknown cause. Assays that assess reactivity against a combination of critical immunodominant regions of disease-specific liver autoantigens may have greater diagnostic and/or prognostic value than those against full length antigens. This project proposes to develop a new test system for the detection of liver disease-specific autoantibodies based on protein/peptide chips incorporating immunodominant epitopes of major liver autoantigens contributing to disease initiation, progression and chronicity. Such an application is highly likely to lead to the development of an innovative screening system that can replace all existing assays (in excess of 20) used for the detection of autoimmune liver disease-specific antibodies.
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