Homo sapiens Genome sequencing

To study the effects of Belimumab on B cell selection, we performed high throughput sequencing analysis of B cell subsets from lupus patients that have been treated for a long period with belimumab. Although, we show that the survival checkpoint regulated by BAFF in humans is between the transitional type 1 and transitional type 3 stage resulting in >90% deletion of naive B cells, there is remarkably little change in the naive B cell repertoire compared with matched SLE controls. By contrast, using matched B cell subsets from the treated patients and controls we show that there is a more pronounced effect of belimumab on negative selection of B cells bearing autoreactive VH genes into the activated and plasma cell repertoires.