Polyfunctional TEM cells in psoriatic arthritis synovium skewed towards Th17 cells

We read the article by Wade et al 1 with great interest. With very elegant experiments, they have reported enrichment of polyfunctional T-lymphocytes in the synovial tissue of psoriatic arthritis (PsA); they have also noticed that polyfunctional synovial T-cells were positively associated with Disease Activity Index for Psoriatic Arthritis. We agree there are only limited studies in human autoimmune diseases which have addressed regulatory role of T-cell polyfunctionality of the activated effector memory T cells (TEM) in single cell suspensions. We have been working on TEM cell subpopulations in PsA and over years have demonstrated Th17, Th9 and mucosal-associated invariant T cells in PsA,2–4 which are also polyfunctional. In respect to studying polyfunctional T cells in PsA instead of focusing on Th1, Th17 and exTh17 cells,1 we took a different approach to look into the cytokine profile and polyclonality of these TEM cells in respect their profound role in the disease process of PsA such as (IL-17, IL-23R, IL-22 and TNFα) and also compared with that polyfunctional T cells of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) to see whether a role of polyfunctional T cells can be reproduced in an another autoimmune arthritis and if so to identify the differences in …