A new study by scientists at Brigham and Women's Hospital, researchers have found two types of immune cells in the body that are highly responsible for airway inflammation under which asthma is characterized. The discovery of the targets may help in advanced treatments and drugs to stop asthma attacks in millions of people in the U.S. According to a report in Medical Xpress, 19 million adults and 7 million children in the U.S. are affected by the disease.
Scientists conducted a study on 22 people with mild and severe asthma. The participants' blood and lungs were analyzed by the scientists in order to understand the function of each type of cell that triggers asthma attacks. During the study, the scientists noticed two types of immune cells namely: natural killer cells and type 2 innate lymphoid cells, which were highly responsible in airway inflammation among the participants.
Researchers studied individual mechanisms of both the cell types and found a molecule that is responsible for both mechanisms called Lipoxin A4. Researchers noted that Lipoxin A4 was made to act as both - an anti-inflammatory and a resolver.
It was found that lipoxin A4 made the natural killer cells decrease inflammation by allowing the death of eosinophil cells. Type 2 innate lymphoid cells were also stopped from promoting inflammation by blocking interleukin-13 secretion by Lipoxin A4, reports Medical Xpress.
"Stopping airway inflammation is similar to putting out a forest fire," Bruce Levy, MD, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Division, BWH Department of Internal Medicine, senior study author, explained with an example, according to the report. "Firefighters tackle forest fires in two ways-dousing the fire with water and clearing away dry brush that could fuel the fire. Lipoxin A4 does just that to resolve inflammation. It is an airway inflammation fighter that performs the double duty of dampening pathways that ignite inflammation while at the same time clearing away cells that fuel inflammation."
Levy further expressed the necessity of developing enhanced treatments in light of the new observations.
"Most patients with severe asthma have chronic airway inflammation that never fully resolves," he said. "This can lead to daily and often disabling symptoms despite available therapies. Our study provides new information on cellular targets that regulate inflammation and will enable the development of lipoxin-based therapeutics to decrease chronic inflammation in asthma and other diseases."
The findings are published online in a journal Science Translational Medicine.
