Integrative Systems Biology

The monoclonal antibody litifilimab is currently undergoing a clinical phase 3 trial to investigate its potential as a future treatment of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Litifilimab binds to the receptor BDCA2 expressed on plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs), which are capable of producing vast amounts of IFN-1. BDCA2 receptor engagement inhibits the ability of pDCs to produce IFN-1, thus posing an interesting target to possibly reduce inflammation.

I am a 4th-year student in engineering biology (TB) at Linköping University. I was first introduced to systems biology during my bachelor project in the spring of 2025. In the project, my classmates and I created a minimal physiologically based pharmacokinetic (mPBPK) model to simulate litifilimab exposure and BDCA2 expression not only in blood plasma, but also in skin, a highly relevant tissue in SLE patients. By training the model with clinical data from blood plasma, it can now give the first ever predictions of the dose-response relationship in skin. In the future, we hope that this can help physicians to adjust dose selection depending on the characteristics of the cutaneous symptoms in a given patient.a