Interferon & lupus types

Why does lupus look so different from one young person to the next?

For young people & families

The short, jargon-free version

For scientists & clinicians

Questions, methods and key papers

For young people & families

In plain words

Lupus is a condition where the immune system, which normally protects us from germs, attacks the body's own tissues. It can affect the skin, joints, kidneys and other organs. When lupus starts in childhood it is often more severe than when it starts in adulthood.

Interferons are the body's alarm signals. They switch on when a virus gets in and switch off once it has gone. In many young people with lupus, this alarm stays on.

We found that young people with lupus fall into groups depending on how strongly this alarm is switched on, and that each group follows a different path over the years. We are now working on a simple blood test that could tell doctors which group a young person is in, to help them choose the treatment most likely to work.

The alarmInterferons warn the immune system about viruses.

Stuck onIn many young people with lupus the alarm does not switch off.

The goalA blood test that helps match each young person to the right treatment.

For scientists & clinicians

The science

Type I interferon (IFN-I) signalling is a central pathogenic axis in childhood-onset SLE (cSLE), but the IFN signature varies widely between patients and over time. We use systems immunology to resolve this heterogeneity into biologically distinct endotypes and connect them to long-term clinical outcome.

Key questions

Which IFN-driven endotypes exist in cSLE, and how stable are they over time?
Do endotypes predict divergent clinical trajectories and response to treatment?
Can scalable biomarkers such as LAMP3 support IFN-stratified care?

Approach

Multi-omic profiling of a deeply phenotyped UK cohort: transcriptomics, gene co-expression network analysis, high-dimensional immunophenotyping, serum proteomics and machine learning for patient stratification.

Key papers

Cross H, Peng J, …, Robinson GA. Type I interferon endotypes drive divergent clinical trajectories in childhood-onset SLE uncovered through a novel systems immunology approach. Ann Rheum Dis 2026. doi.org/10.1016/j.ard.2025.12.011 Joint first authors Cross and Peng. Open access
Robinson GA, et al. Insights into the pathogenesis of childhood-onset SLE in the past decade. Nat Rev Rheumatol 2025. doi.org/10.1038/s41584-025-01321-x Review
Robinson GA, et al. Disease-associated and patient-specific immune cell signatures in juvenile-onset systemic lupus erythematosus: patient stratification using a machine-learning approach. Lancet Rheumatol 2020. doi.org/10.1016/S2665-9913(20)30168-5 Journal cover