Rock Creek Pharmaceuticals Inc. (fka RCPIQ)

[Buddhahead]

New pathway reveals how immune system is regulated, gives hope for chronic diseases in Medical Express, April 20, 2015

Excerpts:
"Researchers from the University of Birmingham have identified an important new way in which our immune systems are regulated, and hope that understanding it will help tackle the debilitating effects of type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and other serious diseases."

"A healthy, efficient immune system ordinarily works to damp down inflammation and carefully regulate the magnitude of the response to infection and disease. In diseases such as diabetes and arthritis, as well as when we age, our immune system becomes less stringently regulated and this can lead to an exaggerated inflammatory response - allowing inappropriate access of immune cells to vulnerable tissues. The new study shows that beneficial effects of the new pathway are lost in these diseases, as well as during normal ageing.
The study, published in Nature Medicine, details how a key molecule regulates this aspect of our immune response. Importantly, the team were then able to show how the addition of this molecule to immune cells from patients with diabetes and arthritis could regain control of the movement of their immune cells, thereby reversing the pathogenic changes seen in these diseases."

""The fact that the new pathway is relevant to both diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, which are quite different diseases, implies a broad applicability to many chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. This is an area of research we are keen to follow, and will be working with doctors from other specialities to determine whether this is the case and whether new therapies might be more broadly applicable""

"Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: "This is a superb piece of research that appears to have identified a new way to regulate chronic inflammation. It helps to explain why autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis become more common with age."
"It remains to be seen whether these findings will have any direct relevance to cardiovascular disease. However, coronary heart disease tends to be more common in people with chronic inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, so if this research leads to better treatments for these conditions, it might be expected that this will lead to fewer heart attacks in these patients.""

Article at:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-04-pathway-reveals-immune-chronic-diseases.html