Chapters Transcript Video Degranulating PR3+ Myeloid Cells Characterize Proliferative Lupus Nephritis Rheumatologist Andrea Fava discusses a new and exciting discovery being presented at The American College of Rheumatology Annual Meeting. Hi, I'm Andrea. Tha, I'm an assistant professor and director of the Lupus Transitional Research Program at Johns Hopkins University. And today I wanna tell you about a very exciting uh work that we are going to present at AC R. This is about the discovery of a type of immune cells. We we call pr three positive cells in the kidney of patients with Lupus nephritis in the last few years. In collaboration with the Accelerating Medicines Partnership, we have discovered that patients with active lupus nephritis, which means inflammation in the kidney released a lot of pr three in the urine, which is a protein that is associated with neutrophil degranulation. However, there were not a lot of neutrophils in the kidney. And so we went in the kidney and try to solve this mystery. We found to our surprise, a lot of these pr three positive cells and they had some features of neutrophils, but they did not look like neutrophils. And so we developed the technology to stain the tissue to define the identity of these cells. And we have discovered that there are two types of these pr three positive cells, a type that is ac granulocyte which behave like neutrophils and a type that seems to be a phagocyte that has more of an eating ability in the kidney. We discovered that the um density of these cells in the kidney is associated with the severity of the disease. And we are now exploring these cells further to see if we can identify pathways that can lead to an improvement in treatment of patients with lupus nephritis. This abstract is going to be presented by Doctor Alessandra Ida Sala and it will go on the plenary three. I look forward to meeting you there at the session or you can find the abstract online. Created by Related Presenters Andrea Fava, MD Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology View full profile