22 March 2011
Helminthic therapy
In class we talked about how helminthic therapy showed promise in treating IBD in human trails. I was curious about just how effective this therapy is so I looked up one of the original trials. This particular paper by RW Summers was looking to see the effectiveness and safety of using Trichuris suis to treat Crohn's (CD). Summers et al. recruited 29 patients with CD and had them ingest 2500 T. suis ova every 3 weeks for 24 weeks. Out of the 29 patients, they found that 23 of the patients showed improvement in their CD activity index (a method of monitoring CD symptoms). This particular study was very rudimentary as they not only didn't even bother with a control group, but in fact many of these patients enrolled were on other medication to treat CD ... talk about complications. That being said, this study still showed that helminthic therapy could be a novel way to treat CD.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I agree that this article has many loose ends but it is interesting to see the relationship between worm colonization and reduced effects from CD. In the discussion portion of this article, the authors mention that helminth colonization effects Th1 responses by lessening their specific cytokines in circulation. In class I mentioned how I found it interesting that the authors of our reading article did not find a significant Th2 response in their mouse models when administering worm proteins. In this study, the authors also state that helminth colonization produces a Th2 response, alluding to the balancing theory of the immune system between th1 and th2. I think it would be interesting to test the same worm proteins on the alternative mouse model that uses T-cell transfer. This would help to narrow down the effects of helminth proteins on the specific immune cells being affected. Because there was no noticeable change in Th2 response in mice, it would be interesting to see the response in a mouse model without Treg cells in order to more fully understand the interaction of worm protein with the immune system.
ReplyDeleteThe authors of this article also state that patients on immunosuppresive medications faired better in this helminth experiment. More research needs to be performed as to the mechanism with a depressed immune system and colonization regarding inflammation and if the effect is correlated and/or additive.
Joe, I think that is an excellent idea. Naturally T-Regs will try to find a balance to the reaction induced by either CD/UC or the helminth proteins. That being said, I'd caution in reading too much into the lack of Th2 response as I do think the mice were put down before a proper response could be mounted (euthanized 72hrs after helminth injection). I'd like to see a similar experiment run in better IBD models prior to giving the lack of Th2 response any credence.
ReplyDelete