T lymphocytes in synovia of patients with rheumatoid arthritis

Conclusions The observation that rheumatoid synovial-derived lymphocytes display clonal dominance may have important implications in the understanding of the underlying pathogenic processes in RA. Isolation of the relevant T cell clones will allow further characterization including the development of anti-clonotypic mAb which could be used for diagnostic and possibly even for therapeutic purposes. Functional analysis of the clones could be used as an approach to identify the antigen(s) that trigger the disease.Our observations, however, raise a number of points. First, the detection of clonal dominance in a T cell population within a tissue or in blood has been considered a marker of malignancy [9, 13]. Recent studies of several skin diseases suggest that T cell oligoclonality observed in some of these lesions represents a selected repertoire of responding T cells; our study shows that T cell clonality is not restricted to lymphoproliferative diseases but may indeed be a feature of certain inflammatory processes as well.