Peptides as autoimmune diseases antigenic probes - A peptide-based reverse approach to detect biomarkers of autoimmune diseases

Biomarkers are decision-making tools at the basis of clinical diagnostics and essential for guiding therapeutic treatments. In this context, autoimmune diseases represent a class of disorders that need early diagnosis and steady monitoring. In these diseases, the immune system recognizes some antigens no more as self and it is now accepted that post-translational modifications may affect the immunogenicity of self-protein antigens, triggering an autoimmune response. Therefore, posttranslationally modified peptides are the best candidate to develop synthetic probes detecting autoantibodies as disease biomarkers. A “Chemical Reverse Approach” to select synthetic peptides bearing specific post-translational modifications able to fishing out autoantibodies from patients’ biological fluids, can be successfully applied for the development of specific noninvasive diagnostic/prognostic assays of autoimmune diseases.