Medical Discovery News
Science permeates everyday life. Yet the understanding of advances in biomedical science is limited at best. Few people make the connection that biomedical science is medicine and that biomedical scientists are working today for the medicine of tomorrow. Our weekly five-hundred-word newspaper column (http://www.illuminascicom.com/) and two-minute radio show provide insights into a broad range of biomedical science topics. Medical Discovery News is dedicated to explaining discoveries in biomedical research and their promise for the future of medicine. Each release is designed to stimulate listeners to think, question and appreciate how science affects their health as well as that of the rest of the world. We also delve into significant biomedical discoveries and portray how science (or the lack of it) has impacted health throughout history.
Medical Discovery News
Now an RA Vaccine
899 – An RA Vaccine
Welcome to Medical Discovery News. I’m Dr. David Niesel.
And I’m Dr Norbert Herzog.
We generally associate vaccines with protection from infectious diseases such as measles and the flu. However, scientists have developed a vaccine to prevent an autoimmune disease, rheumatoid arthritis.
We’ll call it RA for short and it mostly affects women. The immune system attacks multiple body systems but more often the tissues lining the joints of hands, wrists, feet, ankles, knees, shoulders, and elbows.
There’s a hypothesis that some of our auto-antibodies, which remove certain proteins and tamp down on the immune system, can be used to protect us from developing RA. Now researchers are trying to induce this process.
They discovered this auto-antibody when they began to look at certain proteins and their roles in RA and honed in on fourteen-three-three-zeta. They found that it’s involved in the regulation of immune response but not in they way they had guessed.
When they made a mouse lacking the gene, it developed early onset arthritis which suggests it has an arthritis suppressive mechanism.
They then made the fourteen three three zeta protein in bacteria and used it to immunize normal mice and mice without the gene and it protected both groups against RA.
How this gene does that isn’t clear, but people with RA have lower levels of the antibody. In mouse models, the vaccine works better than current treatments.
The next step is clinical trials which is still a long process, but this type of research gives hope to the twenty million people worldwide who suffer from RA.
We are Drs. David Niesel and Norbert Herzog, at UTMB and Quinnipiac University, where biomedical discoveries shape the future of medicine. For much more and our disclaimer go to medicaldiscoverynews.com or subscribe to our podcast. Sign up for expanded print episodes at www.illuminascicom.com
