High-dimensional analysis of T-cell profiling variations following belimumab treatment in systemic lupus erythematosus

Objective: This study sought to elucidate the molecular impacts of belimumab (BEL) treatment on T-cell immune profiling in SLE.

Methods: We used mass cytometry with 25 marker panels for T-cell immune profiling in peripheral blood T cells (CD3+) from 22 patients with BEL-treated SLE and 20 controls with non-BEL-treated SLE. An unsupervised machine-learning clustering, FlowSOM, was used to identify 39 T-cell clusters (TCLs; TCL01-TCL39). TCLs (% of CD3+) showing significant (p<0.05) associations with BEL treatment (BEL-TCL) were selected by a linear mixed-effects model for comparing groups of time-series data. Furthermore, we analysed the association between BEL treatment and variations in regulatory T-cell (Treg) phenotypes, and the ratio of other T-cell subsets to Treg as secondary analysis.

Results: Clinical outcomes: BEL treatment was associated with a decrease in daily prednisolone use (coef=-0.1769, p=0.00074), and an increase in serum CH50 (coef=0.4653, p=0.003), C3 (coef=1.1047, p=0.00001) and C4 (coef=0.2990, p=0.00157) levels. Molecular effects: five distinct BEL-TCLs (TCL 04, 07, 11, 12 and 27) were identified. Among these, BEL-treated patients exhibited increased proportions in the Treg-like cluster TCL11 (coef=0.404, p=0.037) and two naïve TCLs (TCL04 and TCL07). TCL27 showed increased levels (coef=0.222, p=0.037) inversely correlating with baseline C3 levels. Secondary analyses revealed associations between BEL treatment and an increase in Tregs (coef=1.749, p=0.0044), elevated proportions of the fraction of Tregs with inhibitory function (fTregs, coef=0.7294, p=0.0178) and changes in peripheral helper T cells/fTreg (coef=-4.475, p=0.0319) and T helper 17/fTreg ratios (coef=-6.7868, p=0.0327). Additionally, BEL was linked to variations in T-cell immunoglobulin and mucin domain-containing protein-3 expression (coef=0.2422, p=0.039).

Conclusions: The study suggests an association between BEL treatment and variations in T cells, particularly Tregs, in SLE pathologies involving various immune cells.