Ricerc@Sapienza

Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS) is the most common disease belonging to the group of Spondyloarthropathies. Far from to clarify the causes of this pathology, Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) have identified several risk factors associated to AS besides the Human Leukocyte Antigen, HLA-B27, which is the major AS-risk factor playing a role as antigen presenting molecule to CD8+ T cells. First of all, GWAS have disclosed a peak of association with ERAP 1 and 2, two aminopeptidases, implicated in the processing of peptides presented by HLA-I molecules and RUNX3, TBX21, ZMIZ1, EOMES that are all factors involved in the CD8+ T cell development, differentiation, function and counts. All these elements converge on a possible role of CD8+ T cells in sustaining the chronic inflammation in AS. Accordingly, we are focusing our work on the chemotactic properties of this cell subset and preliminary data of cell migration showed an intrinsic hypermotility of CD8+ T cells from AS patients compared to control groups: healthy donors (HD) and patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). Our goal is to characterize the immunophenotype, the effector functions and the gene expression profile of the CD8+ T cell population showing this spontaneous hypermotility and, specifically in this project, to visualize the motility of such T lymphocytes by time laps microscopy.