According to a recent study, a group of researchers from the University of California, Irvine found out that the cell-to-cell communication networks could perpetuate irritation and help to prevent repigmentation in patients with vitiligo disease.The finding of the study "Multimodal Analyses of Vitiligo Skin Identifies Tissue Characteristics of Stable Disease," were published in the journal JCI Insight.
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"In this study, we couple advanced imaging with transcriptomics and bioinformatics to discover the cell-to-cell communication networks between keratinocytes, immune cells and melanocytes that drive inflammation and prevent repigmentation caused by vitiligo," said Anand K. Ganesan, MD, PhD, professor of dermatology and vice chair for dermatology research at UCI School of Medicine. "This discovery will enable us to determine why white patches continue to persist in stable vitiligo disease, which could lead to new therapeutics to treat this disease."
Vitiligo is an autoimmune skin disease that is characterized by the progressive destruction of melanocytes, which are mature melanin-forming cells in the skin, by immune cells called autoreactive CD8 T cells that result in disfiguring patches of white depigmented skin. This disease has shown to cause significant psychological distress among patients. Melanocyte destruction in active vitiligo is mediated by CD8 T cells, but until now, why the white patches in stable disease persist was poorly understood.