Physician’s Brief clinical and research highlights for our colleagues in rheumatology Ye a r- E n d 2014
The U-M Schleroderma Program Collaborating to solve a painful mystery Patients battling the debilitating and painful progression of schleroderma face a painful journey. The exact cause of the disease is not yet clearly understood, and there are few good treatment options - let alone a cure – for it. Yet although we have a long way to go to defeat schleroderma, survival rates continue to improve as research advances lead to better treatments for the specific internal organ complications it causes. Many of those breakthroughs are being made in the labs and clinics of the University of Michigan. Since the U-M Scleroderma Program launched in 2004, we have remained focused on our dual mission of developing more effective therapies for scleroderma and its complications while investigating the causes and mechanisms of this complex disease. That requires a multidisciplinary approach to everything we do, involving U-M
faculty from disciplines including the Division of Rheumatology, the Interstitial Lung Disease Program in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, the Pulmonary Hypertension Program of the Division of Cardiology, Pediatric Rheumatology, the Department of Dermatology, the Division of Hand Surgery, the Department of Occupational Therapy and the Cancer Center. Clinical care is provided primarily to patients throughout Michigan and the Midwest, but the program also serves as an international referral center.
One “switch” closer to a cure In the spring of 2014, a unique collaboration between investigators at U-M and Michigan State University published a groundbreaking study detailing both their identification of a
signaling pathway that turns off scleroderma and a class of chemical compounds that can flip the switch. “The majority of drug treatments that exist today for fibrosis basically look at reducing just the inflammation,” says Dinesh Khanna, M.D., M.S., director of the U-M Scleroderma Program. “There are other drugs that block one or two of the signaling pathways that cause the disease, but scleroderma has many of these pathways.” These new compounds target the genetic switch that controls the formation of myofibroblasts – cells that produce too much collagen, which leads to thickening of skin and damage to other organs. The work originated in the lab of former U-M pharmacology professor Richard Neubig, M.D., Ph.D., now chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the MSU College of Osteopathic Continued on page 2