Personal interest

Lupus is an autoimmune disease like Multiple Sclerosis and any advance offers a ray of reflected hope for my condition.

Gene advance on immune disorder

Skin lesions are one of many symptoms of lupus

The genes involved in the devastating immune system disease Lupus, which affects 50,000 people in the UK, have been identified.

A team led by London's Imperial College examined the genetic makeup of 3,000 women, publishing their findings in the journal Nature Genetics.

The suspect genes could open the door to research into new treatments.

Charity Lupus UK said that the find might one day lead to a test to speed up the diagnosis of the condition.

This study represents a milestone in progress towards unravelling the secrets of the disease Professor Timothy Vyse Imperial College London

Lupus is a complex condition, mostly affecting women, which frequently causes skin rash, joint pains and fatigue, and which can also lead to inflammation of the kidneys and other internal organs.

It happens when the person's own immune system starts launching attacks on healthy tissue, and the only current treatments aim to suppress the immune system to reduce this.

The study looked at 720 women with the illness, and compared their genes with those of 2,337 who are free of the disease.

This revealed three candidate genes with strong links to Lupus, and a few others with weaker links to the disease.

One of the strong candidates, the ITGAM gene, is known to play a role in the immune system.

The other genes identified were more surprising to the experts, but could, they say, hold the key to developing more effective therapies.

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