all Jeffrey M. Drazen stories

Mouse model devised that develops asthma

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:18:44 -0400

A Harvard research team led by Laurie Glimcher, Irene Heinz Given professor of immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health and a Harvard Medical School professor of medicine, two years ago discovered a molecule that they named T-bet. T-bet seemed to help control the immune system response by determining the actions of helper T cells, which are orchestrators of the immune response to disease. Glimcher's team studied mice that were engineered to lack T-bet. The mice, they found, had an uneven immune system response. Furthermore, the mice spontaneously developed the symptoms of asthma. The finding by Glimcher and her team helps to prove the case for T-bet as an important therapeutic target in several diseases, and also provides a new model for studying asthma.

Breathing new life into asthma therapy

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:13:21 -0400

Asthma attacks have lasting effects because the lungs' most delicate airways can become scarred. This makes future attacks all the worse. Researchers at Harvard Medical School have looked at what happens during asthma attacks, and believe that the damage to airways can be prevented or lessened by prescribing muscle relaxants in addition to anti-inflammatory steroids. Prescribing muscle relaxants is actually an old asthma therapy that was discarded two decades ago in favor of anti-inflammatory steroid treatments. The supplanting of one therapy by another has caused some physicians in the United States to resist the idea of combining the drugs, though such combined therapies — steroids and muscle relaxants in the same inhaler — are already used in Europe.