RESEARCH ARTICLE
Synovial Tissue Response to Treatment with TNF Blockers in Peripheral Spondyloarthritis
Jacqueline E Paramarta, Dominique Baeten, Leen De Rycke*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2011Volume: 5
Issue: Suppl 1
First Page: 127
Last Page: 132
Publisher ID: TORJ-5-127
DOI: 10.2174/1874312901105010127
Article History:
Received Date: 27/3/2011Revision Received Date: 3/10/2011
Acceptance Date: 10/10/2011
Electronic publication date: 30/12/2011
Collection year: 2011

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
This review describes the synovial response to treatment in peripheral spondyloarthritis (SpA). A series of recent studies demonstrates that the synovial histopathology is largely homogenous between different SpA subtypes and can be strongly modulated by effective treatment such as tumor necrosis factor (TNF) blockade. This includes a dramatic reduction of the infiltration with inflammatory cells (with the intriguing exception of B lymphocytes and plasma cells), a modulation of structural features such as vascularity, intimal lining layer hyperplasia, and ectopic lymphoid neogenesis, and a down-regulation of a variety of mediators involved in tissue damage. The analysis of tissue response to targeted therapies appears to be a novel and elegant approach to study the immunopathology of human peripheral SpA in vivo. Moreover, detailed cellular and molecular analysis of synovial features allows to identify synovial biomarkers of clinical response to therapeutic interventions which can be used in future early phase clinical trials in SpA.