PEPperPRINT GmbH, an innovative and award-winning biotech company and the leading provider of high-density peptide microarrays for antibody and serum analyses, is going to introduce a novel biomarker set for the early diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in a talk at the 13th International Congress on Autoimmunity to be held in Athens, Greece, on June 10-13th this year.
Dr. Kirsten Heiss, head scientist at the Research and Development unit at PEPperPRINT, is scheduled to present on Sunday, June 12, 2022 at 11:40 am CEST (2:40 am PDT / 5:40 am EDT) during the Rheumatoid Arthritis session held at Trianti Hall. The novel biomarker set consists of linear and cyclic peptides, including citrulline and particularly homocitrulline as posttranslational modifications. While today 30-50% of early RA patients are seronegative with available tests, the new biomarker set reaches RA sensitivity of up to 89%. It can be established as a new test for rheumatoid arthritis or combined with existing serological tests.
Dr. Heiss’s presentation entitled “Novel biomarkers for seronegative rheumatoid arthritis” will cover findings and prospects from a study aimed to identify epitope biomarkers from rheumatoid arthritis sera using a combination of serological profiling using high-density peptide microarrays, bead-based diagnostic platforms, and machine learning-based bioinformatic analyses.
“Not all biomarker discovery projects are successful; sometimes you’ll be disappointed at a late stage of the discovery and development pipeline. However, the outcome of our rheumatoid arthritis study looks completely different and has the potential to leverage the early diagnosis of RA very soon. Our biomarker set was validated with more than 1,000 RA and control sera in a bead-based diagnostic format, and is a milestone for PEPperPRINT. We further look forward to apply our technologies and expertise in new biomarker projects in cancer, infectious disease, and autoimmune research” explains Dr. Volker Stadler, CEO of PEPperPRINT.
