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Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease where the host immune system attacks the synovial issues of the joints and other organs, resulting in chronic joint destruction and disability. While effective treatments have been developed. A cure is elusive and many patients continue to struggle with ongoing disease. Genetic studies have identified key risk alleles that drive the susceptibility of RA. Here we talk about our efforts to understand how these alleles influence T cell molecular traits, including gene expression levels and T cell receptor composition. We will discuss an interdisciplinary approach to this problem including immunology, statistical modeling and genomics.
Soumya Raychaudhuri is a Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, and an Institute Member at Broad Institute. He is the JS Coblyn and MB Brenner Distinguished Chair in Rheumatology/Immunology and a practicing rheumatologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH). He is the Director for the Center for Data Sciences at Brigham and Harvard. In addition, he serves as a Visiting Professor in Genetics at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on human genetics and computational genomics to understand immune-mediated diseases. Raychaudhuri completed his undergraduate degrees in biophysics and mathematics from State University of New York at Buffalo. He went on to join the Stanford University Medical School where he completed his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees. He pursued clinical training in internal medicine, followed by subspecialty training in rheumatology at BWH. He concurrently completed postdoctoral training in human genetics at the Broad Institute. In 2010, he launched his laboratory and joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School. He was promoted to Professor in 2018. His lab at Harvard uses human genetics, functional genomics and bioinformatics techniques to study immune mediated diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and tuberculosis. His lab has also been active in investigating the genetic basis of other diseases including age related macular degeneration and type I diabetes.