ArticleLupus science & medicine2023
High-dimensional analysis of T-cell profiling variations following belimumab treatment in systemic lupus erythematosus.
Article in Lupus science & medicine, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mechanisms of T cell activation: Integrating signaling pathways, experimental models, and therapeutic implications.EXCLI journal · 2026Review
- Immune-cell profiling to guide stratification and treatment of patients with rheumatic diseases.Nature reviews. Rheumatology · 2025Review
- Efficacy and safety of belimumab in refractory and newly diagnosed active lupus nephritis patients: a real-world observational study.Clinical kidney journal · 2025Article
- Systemic lupus in the era of machine learning medicine.Lupus science & medicine · 2024Review
- Mass cytometry: exploring the immune landscape of systemic autoimmune and inflammatory diseases in the past fourteen years.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Review
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveThis study sought to elucidate the molecular impacts of belimumab (BEL) treatment on T-cell immune profiling in SLE.
methodsWe used mass cytometry with 25 marker panels for T-cell immune profiling in peripheral blood T cells (CD3+) from 22 patients with BEL-treated SLE and 20 controls with non-BEL-treated SLE. An unsupervised machine-learning clustering, FlowSOM, was used to identify 39 T-cell clusters (TCLs; TCL01-TCL39). TCLs (% of CD3+) showing significant (p<0.05) associations with BEL treatment (BEL-TCL) were selected by a linear mixed-effects model for comparing groups of time-series data. Furthermore, we analysed the association between BEL treatment and variations in regulatory T-cell (Treg) phenotypes, and the ratio of other T-cell subsets to Treg as secondary analysis.
resultsClinical outcomes: BEL treatment was associated with a decrease in daily prednisolone use (coef=-0.1769, p=0.00074), and an increase in serum CH50 (coef=0.4653, p=0.003), C3 (coef=1.1047, p=0.00001) and C4 (coef=0.2990, p=0.00157) levels. Molecular effects: five distinct BEL-TCLs (TCL 04, 07, 11, 12 and 27) were identified. Among these, BEL-treated patients exhibited increased proportions in the Treg-like cluster TCL11 (coef=0.404, p=0.037) and two naïve TCLs (TCL04 and TCL07). TCL27 showed increased levels (coef=0.222, p=0.037) inversely correlating with baseline C3 levels. Secondary analyses revealed associations between BEL treatment and an increase in Tregs (coef=1.749, p=0.0044), elevated proportions of the fraction of Tregs with inhibitory function (fTregs, coef=0.7294, p=0.0178) and changes in peripheral helper T cells/fTreg (coef=-4.475, p=0.0319) and T helper 17/fTreg ratios (coef=-6.7868, p=0.0327). Additionally, BEL was linked to variations in T-cell immunoglobulin and mucin domain-containing protein-3 expression (coef=0.2422, p=0.039).
conclusionsThe study suggests an association between BEL treatment and variations in T cells, particularly Tregs, in SLE pathologies involving various immune cells.
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