Abstract
Introduction: After more than 20 years of sustained work, the Latin American Group for the Study of Lupus (GLADEL) has made a significant number of contributions to the field of lupus, not only in the differential role that race/ethnicity plays in its course and outcome but also in several other studies including the beneficial effects of using antimalarials in lupus patients and the development of consensus guidelines for the treatment of lupus in our region. Methods: A new generation of “Lupus Investigators” in more than 40 centers throughout Latin America has been constituted in order to continue the legacy of the investigators of the original cohort and to launch a novel study of serum and urinary biomarkers in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus. Results: So far, we have recruited 807 patients and 631 controls from 42 Latin-American centers including 339 patients with SLE without renal involvement, 202 patients with SLE with prevalent but inactive renal disease, 176 patients with prevalent and active renal disease and 90 patients with incident lupus nephritis. Conclusions: The different methodological aspects of the GLADEL 2.0 cohort are discussed in this manuscript, including the challenges and difficulties of conducting such an ambitious project.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 630-640 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Lupus |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: GLADEL, as a Lupus Study Group from the Pan American League of Associations of Rheumatology (PANLAR) has received an unrestricted research grant to carry out this project. Autoantibodies will be kindly performed by INOVA/Werfen; this entity will be responsible for the shipment and management of all samples.
Funding Information:
The authors would like to acknowledge all GLADEL patients without whom this study would have not been possible and all the investigators for their participation and all the data collectors across the region for their ongoing support for the study. The authors are deeply grateful to Catalina Perez Koller, Clinical Marketing Director LatAm and Werfen-Inova for facilitating the project and agreeing to conduct centralized studies of serological biomarkers; to Ashley Orillion, PhD, Scientist, Translational Sciences, Immunology, Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson for its willingness to consider the conduct of the transcriptome studies; to Marvin J. Fritzler and Mark Fritzler, Directors of Mitogen Advanced Diagnostics, University of Calgary, for agreeing to conduct centralized studies of urinary biomarkers; and to Daniel Villalba, Leonardo Grasso and Mauricio Zamboni for providing expert assistance with the ARTHROS-web software. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: GLADEL, as a Lupus Study Group from the Pan American League of Associations of Rheumatology (PANLAR) has received an unrestricted research grant to carry out this project. Autoantibodies will be kindly performed by INOVA/Werfen; this entity will be responsible for the shipment and management of all samples.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.
Keywords
- Latin American
- Lupus
- biomarkers
- lupus nephritis
- multiethnic