New Biomarkers in Autoimmune Disease

摘要

Autoimmune diseases are a group of diverse diseases with a common etiology in which the immune system responds to self-antigens leading to damage or dysfunction of tissues. Biomarkers are those measurable substances in the body which associate with the intensity of a disease or other physiological states. Biomarkers can be used in many fields of clinical practice such as disease diagnosis, disease activity evaluation, and disease pathogenesis study. Biomarker research is a rapidly advancing area in autoimmune disease. A variety of researches on discovering new biomarkers including autoantibodies in autoimmune diseases have been conducted in recent years.Based on this background, this special issue presents recent advances for new biomarkers in autoimmune diseases. From 17 submissions, 8 papers are published covering these autoimmune diseases including systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), lupus nephritis (LN), polymyositis, and ankylosing spondylitis (AS).