Kodi Ravichandran, left, and Sanja Arandjelovic led new research into the causes of rheumatoid arthritis flare-ups.
Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have identified an unexpected contributor to rheumatoid arthritis that may help explain the painful flare-ups associated with the disease. The new findings about rheumatoid arthritis came in an unexpected fashion. Sanja Arandjelovic, a research scientist in the Ravichandran group, was seeking to better understand what causes the inflammation associated with inflammatory arthritis when she noted that deleting a gene called ELMO1 alleviated arthritis symptoms in mice. This was particularly surprising because Arandjelovic and Ravichandran initially thought that loss of ELMO1 would result in increased inflammation. [Read more]