Modified peptides for the diagnosis of autoimmune diseases

Biomarkers are decision-making tools at the basis of clinical diagnostics and essential for guiding therapeutic treatments. In this context, autoimmune diseases represent a class of disorders that need early diagnosis and steady monitoring. It is now accepted that post-translational modifications may affect the immunogenicity of self-protein antigens, triggering an autoimmune response. Therefore, post-translationally modified peptides are the best candidates to develop synthetic probes detecting autoantibodies as disease biomarkers. A "Chemical Reverse Approach" to select synthetic peptides, bearing specific post-translational modifications, able to fishing out autoantibodies from patients' biological fluids, can be successfully applied for the development of specific in vitro diagnostic/prognostic assays of autoimmune diseases. Herein, we report the successful application of this approach to the identification of CSF114(Glc), a glycopeptide useful for the detection of specific biomarkers in sera of Multiple Sclerosis patients.