Using non-intuitive signatures of IL-17 and CSF-1 in cGVHD diagnosis
Boiko JR, Ensbey KS, Waltner OG, et al. Defining Pathogenic IL-17 and CSF-1 Gene Expression Signatures in Chronic Graft-Versus-Host Disease. Blood. 2025; (doi: 10.1182/blood.2024025337).
Researchers say analogous IL-17 and CSF-1 dysregulation signatures may help optimize the use of newly approved agents for the prevention and treatment of chronic graft-versus-host disease (cGVHD), a complication of allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT). The therapies are costly and do not benefit everyone, underscoring the need for strategies that can identify high-risk individuals for preemptive therapy and pinpoint the therapeutic most likely to generate a response in any given patient. Investigators leveraged temporal single-cell RNA sequencing to "reverse engineer" non-intuitive IL-17 and CSF-1 signatures in murine blood monocytes. The signatures can be detected in blood monocyte subsets in 70% of patients at the point of cGHVD diagnosis and in 50% of patients at day +100 post-HCT who went on to develop the condition.