Synthetic peptides as tools for diagnosis and therapeutic strategies to treat systemic lupus erythematous.

Synthetic peptides can advantageously replace cognate proteins in solid-phase assays designed to help diagnosing autoimmune diseases. They can also represent essential tools for the discovery, pre-clinical and pharmaceutical development of therapeutics designed to attenuate these multifactorial and polymorphic diseases. We comment here on the peptide P140 able to delay the development of lupus in mouse models that spontaneously develop the disease and that has been evaluated in multicenter double-blind phase IIb clinical trials including lupus patients.