THE BATTLE against diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and similar diseases is slowly swinging in our favour, an audience in Dublin heard yesterday. Discoveries about the immune system are raising hopes that we might soon beat these debilitating conditions.
“We now have the enemy in our sights,” said Prof Luke O’Neill, the director of the Trinity Biomedical Institute. He is a world leader in the study of our highly complex immune system and has co-founded a company, Opsona Therapeutics, to develop drug treatments to control it.
When working properly it defends against viral and bacterial invasion, but in auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system turns against us, attacking normal tissue and causing the damage we see in these conditions.
Prof O’Neill described the latest discoveries about the immune system at a Science Week talk in Dublin last night organised by Discover Science and Engineering.
The immune system once activated causes inflammation and this aids its ability to fight infection. Unwanted inflammation can also trigger damage to healthy tissues, he said.
He likened the immune system to a string of dominoes. Once set in motion one knocks over the next in a cascade that, in terms of human illness, ends up with disease. In the immune system the dominoes are actually signalling chemicals released to trigger the immune response.
The goal was to discover the function of the individual dominoes, knowledge that could in turn lead to the development of drugs able to block the cascade by stopping it in its tracks. “If we can find the earlier dominoes we can find the key offender,” he said in advance of his talk.
His lab made an important discovery about one domino called NLRP3. Research showed that it was a key initiator for type 2 diabetes. “You can imagine how having that information gives you an opportunity to develop treatments,” he said.
Controlling the immune response means being able to control the inflammatory response. “It is clear the inflammation process in the body is causing diabetes,” he said.
The immune system begins to attack fats in the body, something that can inflame the pancreas where the essential sugar-controlling hormone insulin is produced. “The fats initiate it and that is why obesity is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes,” he said.
The view is however that “we have grounds for optimism”, he added. “The prediction is that we will eventually have treatments for all these inflammatory diseases.”
* Trinity College Dublin last night awarded its George Dawson Prize in Genetics 2011 to the American neurogeneticist Dr Corey Goodman. The award recognises Dr Goodman’s fundamental discoveries about the genes that control how the brain forms the connections that make it work.
He received a gold maquette depicting DNA’s double helix and he delivered a lecture about his work.
Dr Goodman is now founding partner and managing director of the venture capital firm venBio.