Controlling inflammation could offer new treatments for diseases

Identifying the chemical switches that turn different parts of our immune system on and off is opening up new avenues for treating diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis – and potential new uses for discarded drugs, according to Professor Luke O’Neill, an immunologist at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

‘The normal job of inflammation is to fix tissues. If you sprain your ankle and get an injury, inflammation is triggered to repair the wound. What’s amazing is that inflammation lies at the heart of so many diseases, when it gets out of control. That could be Alzheimer’s in the brain, rheumatoid arthritis in joints, Crohn’s disease in the gut or arteriosclerosis in the blood vessels. Steroids work for several of these diseases. Though steroids have side effects, this shows the diseases follow a common pathway. This gives us hope that if we can find specific pathways we could treat patients with different inflammatory disorders.’