OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
In healthy joints, Synovial Fibroblasts (SFs) provide the required stromal support, but are recognized to adopt a pathological role in rheumatoid arthritis, delivering region-specific signals to infiltrating cells that perpetuate inflammation. Interventions targeting SFs would improve current systemic therapies by directly modifying disease progression. Unfortunately, our collective understanding of stromal immunology has not been translated to the clinic and new strategies are needed to find novel therapeutic targets. The vast, and yet unexploited amount of information contained in cell glycomes could offer such molecular targets, as glycans – or carbohydrates – are being increasingly recognized as fundamental regulators of cellular interactions between stromal and immune cells. Our results show that transformation of SFs into pro-inflammatory cells in arthritis is associated with glycan remodelling in response to pro-inflammatory mediators, a process that involves regulation of terminal sialylation. Implications for changes in glycosylation pathways in disease progression and remission will be discussed.