Beyond the balance – the launch of npj Autoimmunity

This inaugural editorial introduces npj Autoimmunity and sets out the journal’s ambition to examine autoimmune disease across traditional diagnostic and disciplinary boundaries. Drawing on observations that regulatory immune cells persist within actively inflamed rheumatoid joints, it argues that autoimmunity is not simply a failure of regulation to be present, but of regulation to remain effective within particular tissue and disease contexts. It calls for a shift beyond immune suppression towards restoring tolerance and for cross-disease studies that reveal both shared mechanisms and the contexts in which they diverge.