Indeed, high doses of representative drugs currently used as standard SLE treatments failed to inhibit IRF5 phosphorylation, another hallmark of its activation, as detected by a phospho-IRF5-specific monoclonal antibody in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) stimulated in vitro with R-848, which is a ligand of TLR7 and TLR8 (Fig. 1j; the validation of antibody specificity is shown in Supplementary Fig. 4a). This evidence concerns the gene TLR7 and systemic lupus erythematosus.