Researchers at St. Mary's Hospital have discovered a new bifidobacterium by analyzing the intestinal flora of rheumatoid arthritis patients, confirming the bifidobacterium’s excellence in treating rheumatoid arthritis through animal trials.
Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic inflammatory autoimmune disease that occurs in about 1 percent of the population.
In patients with rheumatoid arthritis, the synovial membrane excessively proliferates due to abnormal functions of various immune cells such as lymphocytes, blood vessels, macrophages, and synovial cells, causing chronic inflammation and damage to the bones and cartilage, leading to destruction and deformation of joints.
Hospitals use disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs), biological agents, Janus kinase (JAK), and signal transducers and activators of transcription (STAT) to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Despite the improvement effect of therapies, the number of patients showing adverse reactions to drugs due to side effects or drug resistance increases.
The research team attempted to find a cure by analyzing the intestinal flora after dividing 16 ordinary people and 93 rheumatoid arthritis patients into a rheumatoid autoantibody-negative group, a low group, and a high group.
Professors Park Sung-hwan of the Department of Rheumatology and Cho Mi-ra of the Department of Biomedical Sciences led the research.
In the patient group with high rheumatoid factor, the team confirmed that actinobacteria significantly decreased, showing a negative correlation.
The researchers also could confirm bifidobacterium bacteria reduced statistically and significantly after conducting a low-level analysis of actinobacteria.
They conducted animal experiments after acquiring bifidobacterium longum RAPO (B. longum RAPO) through a functional verification process that confirmed that the bifidobacterium induced immunoregulatory T cells using the patient's intestinal bacteria and suppressed autoimmune T cells, which cause the disease.
As a result of investigating the disease effect of bifidobacterium in the animal model, the research team confirmed that B. longum RAPO reduced the arthritis index by more than 50 percent compared to the control group.
"Using the results of this study, we expect the administration of bifidobacterium in rheumatoid arthritis patients to help improve the therapeutic effect of rheumatoid arthritis," Professor Park said. "Based on this research, we are developing a treatment using Enterobacteriaceae that we can use on rheumatoid arthritis patients to help restore normal immune homeostasis."
Frontiers in Immunology has published the result of the study.