Editorial

From the desk of the editor

Welcome to the June homepage edition for i2P (Information to Pharmacists) E-Magazine.
The editor’s desk has been vacant for nearly a month to enable a short vacation to happen, and gratefully it has stirred some sort of a revival.
The volume of work unpublished over May will be reorganised and will appear gradually over future editions.
Since resuming “the desk” the pressure has recommenced, but that is part of the job.
This month we have featured Gerald Quigley as he illustrates an evidence-based complementary medicine that helps Alzheimer patients. The product is already helping patients but is being criticised because of a perceived lack of “quality” in its evidence profile.
Mark Coleman has jumped in to point out the lack of quality in mainstream evidence for drugs, and I find it quite appalling that a serial complainer can justify any mainstream evidence as being “gold standard”.
Read Mark’s article under the title of “Research and other Medical Wonders”.

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Injection offers hope for treating auto-immune disease

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	Staff Researcher articles by this author...
Editing and Researching news and stories about Australian and International Pharmacy Issues

Australian researchers have uncovered a potential new way to regulate the body’s natural immune response, offering hope of a simple and effective treatment for auto-immune diseases.
Auto-immune diseases result from an overactive immune response that causes the body to attack itself.
The new approach involves increasing good regulating cells in the body, unlike most current research which focuses on stopping “bad” or “effector” cells, says lead researcher Dr Suzanne Hodgkinson, from UNSW’s Faculty of Medicine and Liverpool Hospital.

The researchers induced the body’s T-cell front-line defences by injecting cell-signalling proteins called cytokines, in particular cytokine Interleukin-5 (II-5 cytokine).

When T-regulatory cells are grown in a way to make them specific to a particular protein they develop receptors for the Il-5 cytokine. The Il-5 cytokine boost allows the body’s immune system to better regulate its response to disease without going into overdrive.

The team cloned II-5 cytokine and injected it into rats with the neurological condition Guillain–Barré syndrome. These rats recovered much quicker and, if treated as a precaution, did not fall ill. The method has also shown promise in animals with multiple sclerosis, with kidney disease nephritis and trying to overcome organ transplantation rejection.

“One of the nice things about this discovery is that it is one of the few treatments in the auto-immune world and in the transplantation world that works not by attacking the effector cells, but by increasing the good regulating cells. So it works in a very different way from almost every other treatment we’ve got available,” Dr Hodgkinson says.

Il-5 injections could be more palatable than inoculation by parasitic worms – another approach in regulating auto-immune conditions, the researchers say.

International research shows swallowing helminths parasites can regulate the immune system and boost T-cell production to combat illnesses such as celiac disease and multiple sclerosis. The absence of the worms in guts in the developed world has been cited as a possible cause for the sharp rise in auto-immune diseases in Western nations.

“The process we’ve developed may be the same process that the helminths kick off. When you get a helminths infestation, one of the changes in your immune response is an increase in cells called eosinophils and these cells make the cytokine Interleukin-5,” Dr Hodgkinson says.

“In this new treatment, it’s a matter of injecting the interleukin-5 and the body does the rest. It’s both safe and effective and we think inducing the immune response by injection may be more attractive to people than swallowing parasitic worms.”

The next step is to take the treatment to human trials, which could be underway within two to five years, says Dr Hodgkinson, whose paper outlining the study has been published in the journal Blood.

The research was supported by grants from Bob and Jack Ingham, Liverpool Australia; Multiple Sclerosis Research Australia; the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council; the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation; Novatis; and funds from UNSW.

Lead researcher was UNSW research fellow Dr Giang Tran. Dr Hodgkinson and co-author Professor Bruce Hall hold US patents related to the treatment.

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