Photo Credit: Artur Plawgo
The following is a summary of “Multimodal profiling of peripheral blood identifies proliferating circulating effector CD4+T cells as predictors for response to integrin α4β7-blocking therapy in inflammatory bowel disease,” published in the September 2024 issue of Gastroenterology by Horn et al.
Despite the success of biological therapies in treating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), it remains challenging to manage patients due to the lack of reliable predictors for therapy response.
Researchers conducted a prospective study to identify predictors of response to vedolizumab in patients with IBD.
They sampled 2 groups of patients with IBD who were treated with vedolizumab. They assessed vedolizumab-induced immune changes in peripheral blood using several techniques, including mass cytometry, single-cell RNA sequencing, single-cell V(D)J sequencing, serum proteomics, and flow cytometry.
The results showed that vedolizumab treatment led to significant changes in circulating immune cell lineages and altered the T cell receptor diversity of gut-homing CD4+ memory T cells. Through multimodal analysis and machine learning, they identified a notable increase in proliferating CD4+ memory T cells among non-responders before treatment compared to responders. This predictive T cell signature had an activated Th1/Th17 phenotype and higher levels of integrin α4β1, potentially making these cells less responsive to vedolizumab.
The study concluded that a T cell signature could serve as a predictor for therapy response, improving personalized treatment for IBD.
Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016508524055276