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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Michael Barnes, Professor Fai Ng
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© The Author(s) 2026. Sjögren’s disease (SjD) remains a major unmet medical challenge, characterised by biological complexity, patient heterogeneity, and the absence of curative treatments. To advance mechanistic understanding and support therapeutic discovery, we developed a comprehensive Molecular Interaction Map (MIM). Differential expression analyses were conducted on peripheral blood samples from SjD patients and healthy controls across three datasets (GSE51092, UKPSSR, PRECISESADS), identifying 1,625 differentially expressed genes (DEGs), of which 25 were shared across all datasets. Nine common DEGs were linked to interferon signalling, reinforcing its pivotal role in SjD pathogenesis. Pathway enrichment analysis revealed 137 pathways, 43 of which were integrated into the MIM alongside literature-derived knowledge. The resulting SjD Map, freely available at https://sjdmap.elixir-luxembourg.org/, encompasses 829 molecular entities connected by 598 interactions by transcriptomic data and by curated evidence. This first comprehensive SjD Map provides an integrative framework for visualising pathways, overlaying omics data, and exploring therapeutic opportunities.
Author(s): Silva-Saffar SE, Mariette X, Gottenberg J-E, Bombardieri M, Cornec D, Alarcon-Riquelme ME, Barnes MR, Ng S, Ng W-F, Nocturne G, Niarakis A
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: npj Systems Biology and Applications
Year: 2026
Volume: 12
Online publication date: 28/03/2026
Acceptance date: 10/02/2026
Date deposited: 23/06/2026
ISSN (electronic): 2056-7189
Publisher: Springer Nature
URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41540-026-00670-x
DOI: 10.1038/s41540-026-00670-x
Data Access Statement: The SjD Map is freely accessible at https://sjdmap.elixir-luxembourg.org/. All PMIDs of the scientific articles used for map construction are available in the map’s annotation section. All data and code used to generate results, including XML files of the maps, confidence score calculations, overlays, and gene expression analysis, are available on the Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15373342 and GitLab repository: https://gitlab.com/genhotel/TheSjDMap.
PubMed id: 41904187
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