This project involves the conduct of diagnostic, natural history assessment and therapeutic clinical trials for inherited immune deficiencies. This project specifically include studies of the diagnostic procedures (including genetic diagnosis), and treatment modalities that are alternatives to allogeneic transplantation and gene therapy (treatment modalities that are the subject of companion projects with the same types of patients). Patients with X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (XSCID) caused by mutations in the IL2RG gene encoding the common gamma chain (gc) of receptors for interleukins (IL)-2, -4, -7, -9, -15 and -21 often are treated as infants. XSCID patients are studied at NIH who have failed to achieve or maintain immune reconstitution after having as infants received non-conditioning haploidentical parental bone marrow transplants. Such patient often have waning immunity near the end of their first decade of life, and also have associated severe problems with short stature, malnutrition from gastrointestinal malabsorption, various kinds of pulmonary dysfunction, and chronic sinusitis. We have noted a defect in response to growth hormone in such patients and have opened a clinical trial to treat short stature in these pre-adolescent XSCID children. We follow many patients with both autosomal and X-linked forms of chronic granulomatous disease (AR or X-CGD). Patients with CGD have defective circulating blood neutrophils that fail to produce microbicidal hydrogen peroxide. They suffer from recurrent life threatening infections and premature mortality. In addition to recurrent infections including many kinds of difficult to treat fungus infections, CGD patients often have a variety of autoinflammatory syndromes, but we have also noted a high incidence of actual defined autoimmune disorders such as Crohns disease of the gastrointestinal system as well as increased incidence of lupus erythematosis, sarcoidosis, and other syndromes of autoimmunity. We have an ongoing clinical trial of treatment of severe Crohn's-like disease of CGD with TNFa inhibitors such as infliximab. We also are finding that patients with CGD with autoinflammatory lung disease may respond to treatment with methotrexate, though studies are ongoing. Thus, we have increasingly recognized and documented that autoimmune problems can affect patients with a variety of primary immune deficiencies (PID). Many types of PID are more aptly characterized as diseases of immune dysregulation rather than just as immune deficiency with recurrent infections. We published a paper describing two patients in which chronic granulomatous disease appears to have triggered the development of sarcoidosis, an autoimmune disease not generally seen in CGD. This was the first report of sarcoidosis in CGD, but Crohns disease, discoid lupus erythematosis and rheumatoid arthritis have been noted in CGD patients. We proposed in this paper an important new paradigm in understanding CGD, suggesting that there is immune dysregulation associated with CGD that may trigger autoimmune diseases in a subset of patients where the specific autoimmune disease triggered likely related to an individual patients genetic predisposition to a particular autoimmune disease. This has important therapeutic management implications in that specific therapies proven to be effective for the specific autoimmune disease triggered by CGD must be used in such patients rather than just the general clinical management modalities designed to prevent infections, or control the general inflammation common to most CGD patients. We have also in collaboration with Dr. Philip Murphy and Dr. David McDermott in the Lab of Molecular Immunity, NIAID and Dr. Sam Hwang in Dermatology, NCI begun to study the problems that affect patients with WHIM syndrome noting severe neutopenia, increased incidence of human papilloma related cancers and other problems such as chronic pulmonary disease. Studies are in progress to determine better treatments for this disorder. Study of WHIM also interfaced with our related project that seeks to understand the role of CXCR4 (defective in WHIM) in trafficking of hematopoietic cells, including CD34 stem cells into and out of the bone marrow.
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