Immunoproteomic Profiling of Autoantibodies and Antibodies against Infectious Agents in Autoimmune Diseases.

Prior research investigated limited antibody sets within individual autoimmune diseases. Using the Nucleic-Acid Programmable Protein Array platform, we measured antibodies against 280 human, 40 viral, and 15 bacterial antigens in serum from 237 patients with 8 autoimmune diseases, including autoimmune gastritis (AG), autoimmune thyroiditis (AT), celiac disease (CD), idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIM), type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1D), rheumatoid arthritis (RA), Sjögren's disease (SjD), and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), and 112 controls. Candidate antibodies were identified by combining Firth logistic regression and machine learning. We identified disease-specific antibodies, ranging from 3 in IIM to 13 in SLE for IgG and 1 in CD to 13 in AG for IgA. Additionally, 63 IgG and 44 IgA antibodies were shared across two or more diseases. Notably, two IgG autoantibodies overlapped in up to five diseases: directed against STNM4 (SLE, SjD, T1D, CD, and RA) and TRIM21 (SLE, SjD, IIM, CD, and RA); and three IgA antibodies in up to seven diseases: directed against H1N1 Influenza A virus NP (IIM, SjD, AG, T1D, CD, RA, and AT) and Coxsackievirus B3MK012537 and Enterovirus C PVgp1 (IIM, SjD, AG, T1D, CD, SLE, and RA). These findings underscore the potential of antibody profiling in autoimmune disease characterization and biomarker discovery.