University of Alberta researchers identified a unique biological marker that can be used to identify the presence of the rare autoimmune disease myasthenia gravis, predict the course of the disease and identify new, personalized treatments.
Siddiqi and his team first compared the serum of patients with myasthenia gravis to a healthy control group. They then performed a comparison of serum from myasthenia patients to serum from rheumatoid arthritis, another autoimmune disease. After identifying more than 10,000 compounds in the serum samples, they found a unique pattern of 12 metabolites exclusive to patients with myasthenia gravis.