Mitochondrial and oxidative stress genes are differentially expressed in neutrophils of sJIA patients treated with tocilizumab: a pilot microarray study

We hypothesised that neutrophil pathways could be also be important in the pathogenesis of sJIA. We therefore studied the gene profile in both PBMC and neutrophils of sJIA patients treated with tocilizumab. We demonstrate that neutrophils from sJIA patients showed significantly different changes in gene expression in response to tocilizumab. We studied the transcriptomes of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) and neutrophils from eight paired samples obtained from 4 sJIA patients taken before and after tocilizumab treatment.