Recent advances in diagnostic technologies for autoimmune diseases

The investigation of autoimmunity provides an interest challenge in "omics" research and, particularly, proteome research, as autoimmune diseases are common disorders of unsolved etiology that occur in a wide range of manifestations, in all of which tissues and organs are attacked by the body's own immune system. Autoantibodies are a hallmark of many autoimmune diseases and the presence of autoantibodies is a distinctive and key characteristic of autoimmune diseases. Conventionally, the study of autoimmune response has always been conducted by analysing the presence and/or concentration of individual antibodies in biological fluids. New proteomic techniques allow the simultaneous identification/measurement of different autoantibodies in sera of patients suffering from autoimmune diseases. The possibility of simultaneously measuring a number of correlated analytes appears to be very interesting for analytical reasons (reduced volumes of biological samples, reagents and low costs), logistical/managerial reasons, and pathophysiological reasons (combination of markers in disease-oriented or organ-oriented profiling). In particular, we describe data collected by using high-throughput techniques such as antigen microarrays and mass spectrometry for antibody profiling. While recently collected data demonstrate satisfactory analytical sensitivity and reproducibility, some issues such as standardization and data interpretation have to be solved before the introduction of these new and promising techniques into clinical practice.