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The volume of work unpublished over May will be reorganised and will appear gradually over future editions.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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New survival factor for immune cells identified

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

Ms Eleonora Ottina and Dr Marco Herold have identified a survival factor for immune cells
An international team of researchers has discovered that many of the body’s infection-fighting immune cells require a cell survival protein, called A1, to develop and function. Their finding could lead to a better understanding of conditions including leukaemia, allergy and autoimmunity.
The team discovered that without A1, immune cells called lymphocytes and granulocytes could not develop, or could not respond appropriately to infectious stimuli.

A1 is part of the Bcl-2 protein family, which controls the survival of cells. The research team developed a method of depleting A1 from immune cells, allowing them to study the development and function of immune cells lacking A1. The findings were published online last month in the journal Blood.

The research was jointly led by Dr Marco Herold, from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute’s Molecular Genetics of Cancer division, and Dr Andreas Villunger of Innsbruck Medical University, Austria, a former postdoctoral researcher at the institute. Dr Herold, who began the research while at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, said the discovery had surprised many scientists working in the area. “For more than a decade, we have known that cell survival proteins such as Bcl-2 are important for immune cell development and function,” he said. “A1 proved more difficult to work with than other, closely related, proteins so many researchers ignored it. Our work has shown that A1 has many important roles in the immune system.”

Ms Eleonora Ottina, a student visiting the institute from the Molecular Cell Biology and Oncology post-graduate program at Innsbruck Medical University, said the discovery had opened the door to several new fields of research into human disease. “It is well known that conditions including leukaemia, allergy, and autoimmune conditions, such as lupus, can be caused by the survival of defective or unwanted immune cells, which should normally die,” she said.

“Our research has shown that A1 is important for immune cell development and survival, and has given us the tools to deplete cells of A1 protein. We are now working to determine whether the presence of A1 in cells is necessary for the development of leukaemia, autoimmunity or allergy. If it is, depleting or functionally blocking A1 could be a new treatment for these diseases.”

The research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Tiroler Krebshilfe and the German Research Council.

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