Vasculitis is a disease whereby the immune system mistakenly attacks blood vessel walls, causing them to become inflamed. If left untreated, the rare disease can severely damage organs, including the kidneys and lungs. Physicians can treat vasculitis with immunosuppressive medications. But since these drugs often cause serious side effects, they have long sought a way to distinguish people in remission to avoid treating these patients unnecessarily, or to minimize treatment regimens.
A team of researchers and physicians in Berlin now has found a combination of seven proteins in patients’ blood plasma that reliably indicates whether the disease has gone into remission. In the journal “Nature Communications,” the group reports how proteomics and artificial intelligence helped them identify the biomarkers. In principle, their method could also be applied to other immune and inflammatory diseases to make treatment as precise as possible while minimizing side effects.
“Our study shows just how productive the collaboration between the Max Delbrück Center, Charité, ECRC, and BIH has become,” says Dr. Philipp Mertins, head of the Proteomics Technology Platform, which is jointly operated by the Max Delbrück Center and the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH). Mertins is one of three senior authors of the publication. The other two are Dr. Ralph Kettritz of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC), a joint institution of Charité and the Max Delbrück Center, and Dr. Sofia Forslund of the ECRC and the Max Delbrück Center.
“Existing biomarkers, such as the inflammatory marker CRP, cannot reliably tell us whether a patient is in remission,” explains Dr. Uwe Jerke from Kettritz’s team, who shares first authorship with two other scientists. “For some patients, it takes only three months before we can reduce their medication; for others, it may take six months or longer,” adds nephrologist Kettritz. Better biomarkers are needed to guide treatment, which is what prompted the team to collaborate with other Berlin researchers.
“We first identified proteins present in blood plasma from more than 100 Charité patients with vasculitis, about half of whom were in remission, as well as from a control group of healthy individuals,” explains Dr. Marieluise Kirchner, co-first author from Mertins’ team. She and her colleagues identified several hundred proteins of varying levels depending on disease status.
“My task was then to use machine learning, a form of AI, to find proteins among the hundreds identified that were specific to remission,” says Dr. Theda Bartolomaeus, co-first author and former doctoral researcher in Forslund’s research group who is now a postdoc at the University of Oslo. “The key was to first remove from the analysis all the proteins that could mislead the model, like CRP for example, because they weren’t specific enough.” This was a lengthy learning process, she adds.
After accounting for all potential confounding factors, the researchers found a combination of seven proteins that could reliably identify remission. They confirmed their findings in a separate group of around 100 patients from Prague on whom blood plasma samples and clinical data were available.
“Advances in proteomics and AI allow us to develop these kinds of multiprotein signatures,” says Mertins. “They capture the biology of complex diseases much more comprehensively than individual protein biomarkers can.”
Right now, the causal relationships between the seven proteins and vasculitis remain unclear, Jerke cautions. “We also don’t have a widely available test yet,” Kettritz adds. The next step is to conduct studies with larger numbers of participants to determine how well the new assay performs in routine clinical practice — and how much patients actually benefit from it.
Nature Communications
Experimental study
Human tissue samples
Towards a proteomic plasma biomarker panel for diagnosing vasculitis remission
21-Jul-2026