What is Autoimmune Disease?

Autoimmune disease occurs when the body turns against itself. Yet despite this deceptively simple common denominator, autoimmune disease is not one disease but many, its forms seemingly as various as the individuals it afflicts—some 24 million Americans, according to the National Institutes for Health.

While medicine has made enormous leaps in the treatment of other diseases, innovative new treatments for autoimmune disease have lagged behind.  Patients are often diagnosed and treated based on their symptoms, rather than the underlying cause of their condition, and there has been little to no success on preventing autoimmunity before it develops.

Now, with the help of powerful new technologies, researchers are unraveling the mysteries of autoimmune disease. Advances in immunology data, bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are bringing the before amorphous shapes of autoimmune disease into focus.  We now know that each individual has a unique immune fingerprint and that we can use that fingerprint to create personalized therapies—therapies that treat not just the symptoms but the underlying causes of disease.