Recently, PTPN22 has been associated with multiple autoimmune diseases including Type I diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Graves’ disease, Addison’s disease, Myasthenia Gravis, vitiligo, systemic sclerosis juvenile idiopathic arthritis, and psoriatic arthritis.
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Pioneering work by Noel Rose and Ernst Witebsky in New York, and Roitt and Doniach at University College London provided clear evidence that, at least in terms of antibody-producing B lymphocytes, diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and thyrotoxicosis are associated with loss of immunological tolerance, which is the ability of an individual to ignore "self", while reacting to "non-self".
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Clonal Anergy theory, proposed by Nossal, in which self-reactive T- or B-cells become inactivated in the normal individual and cannot amplify the immune response.
Since "the Incident", increased electromagnetic immersion caused women who conceive children on the Island to die of an auto-immune condition during the second trimester of pregnancy.
Birdshot chorioretinopathy is associated with IL-17, a hallmark cytokine of TH17 cells that play an important role in autoimmunity .
In collaboration with Jeffery Dangl, his group discovered that genetic barriers in plants are often associated with autoimmunity.
Steitz's research may yield new insights into the diagnosis and treatment of autoimmune disorders such as lupus, which develop when patients make antibodies against their own DNA, snRNPs, or ribosomes.
The term ‘protective autoimmunity’ was coined by Prof. Michal Schwartz of the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), whose pioneering studies were the first to demonstrate that autoimmune T lymphocytes can have a beneficial role in repair, following an injury to the central nervous system (CNS).