A research team from Queen's University Belfast, in collaboration with an international team of experts, have made ground-breaking insights into how inflammatory diseases work.
The team, led by Professor Paul Moynagh, Professor of Immunology at the Wellcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine at Queen's University Belfast alongside Researchers from the Wellcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine at Queen's, Dr Alice Dubois and Dr Rebecca Ingram found that a protein called Pellino 2 plays an important role in how the body starts the inflammatory response.
Professor Moynagh, explains: "Inflammation is the body's response to infection by disease-causing micro-organisms. This involves the movement of white blood cells, such as neutrophils, from blood vessels, into the infected tissue where they destroy the invading micro-organism.
Dr Alice Dubois, Researcher at the Wellcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine at Queen's, commented on the breakthrough: "Our team at Queen's University demonstrated that the Pellino 2 protein was involved in the production of molecules that promote inflammation during bacterial infection. Blocking this particular protein could therefore be a strategy to treat inflammatory diseases caused by bacteria. This is a key step forward in improving treatment and patient outcomes in a wide range of diseases.
Professor Moynagh's team includes Dr Fiachra Humphries, Dr Ronan Bergin, Dr Nezira Delagic; Dr Bingwei Wang and Ruaidhri Jackson of Maynooth University; and Dr Shuo Yang of the Nanjing Medical University, China.