Asthma treatment hope after genetic discovery
Friday September 9th, 2011
Drugs that treat rheumatoid arthritis may work on asthma patients - so say researchers who discovered two new genetic variants that increase susceptibility to the condition.
An
international study, led by Manuel Ferreira from the Queensland Institute
of Medical Research, Brisbane, Australia, set out to identify new genetic
variations responsible for increasing the risk of asthma.
The team compared the genomes of thousands of asthma patients with those of non-asthmatics from the USA, Australia, Europe and Finland.
They identified two new genetic variants that had a strong link with asthma risk: rs4129267 in the interleukin-6 receptor (IL6R) gene and rs7130588 on chromosome 11q13.5.
Because interleukin 6 (IL-6) plays an important part in immunity and inflammation and rs4129267 affects the receptor, the team suggested drugs that block IL-6, such as tocilizumab, should be considered for clinical trials. It is believed the drugs may prevent or reduce the airway inflammation associated with asthma.
The rs7130588 variant on chromosome 11q13.5 was found to be more common in allergic asthma patients and was found to have a strong link with a nearby variant that is associated with atopic dermatitis.
"Our results are consistent with the contribution of hundreds or potentially thousands of variants with weak effects on asthma risk, which can be identified through larger GWAS as already shown with other diseases,” write the authors, whose study is published in a special European Respiratory Society issue of The Lancet.
In a Comment, Kathleen Barnes from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA discusses the pros and cons of GWAS design and remarks: "Combination of GWAS with next-generation technologies will undoubtedly further help to disentangle the molecular underpinnings of complex traits such as asthma."
Tags: Allergies & Asthma | Australia | Genetics
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