Mineto Ota

Immunosuppressive therapy is effective for exacerbations of RA-ILD. For severe cases with low respiratory function, intensive therapy, including cyclophosphamide, has a potential to improve the prognosis.

Aging is a significant risk factor for autoimmunity, and many autoimmune diseases tend to onset during adulthood. We conducted an extensive analysis of CD4⁺ T cell subsets from 354 patients with autoimmune disease and healthy controls via flow cytometry and bulk RNA sequencing. As a result, we identified a distinct CXCR3^midCD4⁺ effector memory T cell subset that expands with age, which we designated "age-associated T helper (T_HA) cells." T_HA

Recent innovation in high-throughput sequencing technologies has drastically empowered the scientific research. Consequently, now, it is possible to capture comprehensive profiles of samples at multiple levels including genome, epigenome, and transcriptome at a time. Applying these kinds of rich information to clinical settings is of great social significance. For some traits such as cardiovascular diseases, attempts to apply omics datasets in clinical practice for the prediction of the disease

B cells play a crucial role in the immune response and contribute to various autoimmune diseases. Recent studies have revealed abnormalities in the B cell receptor (BCR) repertoire of patients with autoimmune diseases, with distinct features observed among different diseases and B cell subsets. Classically, BCR repertoire was used as an identifier of distinct antigen-specific clonotypes, but the recent advancement of analyzing large-scale repertoire has enabled us to use it as a tool for charact

Standard genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and rare variant burden tests are essential tools for identifying trait-relevant genes. Although these methods are conceptually similar, we show by analyzing association studies of 209 quantitative traits in the UK Biobank that they systematically prioritize different genes. This raises the question of how genes should ideally be prioritized. We propose two prioritization criteria: 1) trait importance - how much a gene quantitatively affects a trai

Genetic association studies provide a unique tool for identifying causal links from genes to human traits and diseases. However, it is challenging to determine the biological mechanisms underlying most associations, and we lack genome-scale approaches for inferring causal mechanistic pathways from genes to cellular functions to traits. Here we propose new approaches to bridge this gap by combining quantitative estimates of gene-trait relationships from loss-of-function burden tests with gene-reg

Using borate buffer a substance that suppresses the ovulation induced with PMS and HCG in immature mice was obtained from acetone-defatted bovine pineal powder by an extraction method similar to that used for an extraction of a gonadotropin-inhibiting substance in urine. This gonadotropin inhibitor in the pineal powder differs from melatonin or arginine vasotocin and seems to be different from the water soluble antigonadotropic substance which has been isolated from the bovine and ovine pineal.