Current asthma treatments don’t work in all patients, and they don’t provide long-term relief from potentially deadly asthma attacks.
Scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) are advancing a new kind of therapy. According to a recent study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, their approach holds promise for providing long-lasting relief for people with asthma-and it may be useful for dampening immune inflammation in general.
The researchers have developed two therapeutic “cocktails” to stop immune cells from overreacting to allergens. The cocktails inhibit key molecules (called ICOSL, OX40L, and CD30L) that they found allow specialized tissue-resident memory T cells to stay active and maintained in high numbers in tissues. Without these molecules, the T cells can’t trigger asthma attacks and do not persist to trigger future asthma exacerbations.
Even better, there are two effective versions of these cocktails. The researchers demonstrated that they could treat a mouse model of severe allergic asthma using either a combination of an ICOSL and OX40L inhibitor-or an ICOSL and CD30L inhibitor.
The researchers are hopeful that these two cocktails may one day give doctors the flexibility to help patients with different forms of allergic asthma.
“If we can target these molecules in human patients, they might be able to develop long-lasting tolerance to allergens,” says study first author LJI Instructor Gurupreet Sethi, Ph.D., who led the study with support from LJI’s Tullie and Rickey Families SPARK Awards for Innovations in Immunology.
This study gives us insight into