Precision medicine in systemic lupus erythematosus

Clinical heterogeneity in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a challenge to effective treatment. This Review describes advances in our understanding of genetic and epigenetic variations in SLE and the roles of immune profiling and biomarker identification in the progress towards precision medicine. Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune disease that has diverse clinical manifestations, ranging from restricted cutaneous involvement to life-threatening systemic organ involvement. The heterogeneity of pathomechanisms that lead to SLE contributes to between-patient variation in clinical phenotype and treatment response. Ongoing efforts to dissect cellular and molecular heterogeneity in SLE could facilitate the future development of stratified treatment recommendations and precision medicine, which is a considerable challenge for SLE. In particular, some genes involved in the clinical heterogeneity of SLE and some phenotype-related loci (STAT4, IRF5, PDGF genes, HAS2, ITGAM and SLC5A11) have an association with clinical features of the disease. An important part is also played by epigenetic varation (in DNA methylation, histone modifications and microRNAs) that influences gene expression and affects cell function without modifying the genome sequence. Immune profiling can help to identify an individual's specific response to a therapy and can potentially predict outcomes, using techniques such as flow cytometry, mass cytometry, transcriptomics, microarray analysis and single-cell RNA sequencing. Furthermore, the identification of novel serum and urinary biomarkers would enable the stratification of patients according to predictions of long-term outcomes and assessments of potential response to therapy.