Old World monkeys could be key to a new, powerful rheumatoid arthritis therapy

Peptide only found in Old World monkeys has the potential to stop rheumatoid arthritis progression better than established treatments

Date:  November 16, 2017

Source:  University of Southern California - Health Sciences

In the quest for a new and more effective treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC looked to a primate that mostly roams the land in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. It was a particular peptide only found in Old World monkeys, called θ-defensin 1 (RTD-1), that the researchers believed had the potential to stop -- or even reverse -- the progression of rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that affects about 1.5 million people in the United States. The promising results of their study were published in PLOS ONE.

"RTD-1 is the prototype of a family of small cyclic peptides (θ-defensins), the only circular proteins in the animal kingdom," says study author Michael Selsted, MD, PhD, chair and professor of pathology at the Keck School. "Previous studies have shown that RTD-1 modulates lethal inflammation in animal models of infection, and we predicted that RTD-1's protective mechanism in those models would translate to rheumatoid arthritis, a disease in which chronic inflammation produces irreversible joint damage."

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