A team of scientists at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Parkville, Australia have claimed that they have identified the molecular triggers of celiac disease, a chronic, painful gut disorder. The scientists expressed hope that the finding could lead to the first drugs to tame the disease.
The celiac disease patient are intolerant to the protein gluten, which is found in wheat, barley and rye and the intake of these foods triggers an immune reaction in their body, which damages the lining of the small intestine.
“Regulating the aberrant immune response to gluten with a drug would be a much more efficient way of dealing with celiac disease," said study senior author Robert Anderson, head of the celiac disease research laboratory at the Institute to MSN. Anderson added that the scientists did not have complete understanding of the response of the immune system to gluten and it was the major hurdle in developing such therapies.
"You can't design drugs for celiac disease until you know the parts of the gluten that are driving the condition," Anderson explained. During their research, Anderson and his team studied the immune responses in the blood of more than 200 celiac disease patients after they were given gluten containing meals. They screened the blood samples to study the responses to thousands of different protein fragments (peptides) found in gluten. The screening showed that the immune system of celiac patients was responding negatively to only three of them. “That suggests that a very precise trigger is driving the immune response. The problem is not so much gluten, it's really these three peptides," noted Anderson. The findings of the study are published in the July 21 issue of Science Translational Medicine.
