Posted on August 17th, 2009 by Craig Maltby, Editor
Immune balance in a genetic erector set
The frontiers of human health–including immune system research–continue to widen and deepen and generally blow up a lot of 
so-called orthodoxy about how the body works–especially at the cellular level.
An announcement from Stanford University late last week about a student project competition demonstrated how cell biology and genetic research continue to change conventional approaches to medicine. (It’s also a bit amazing to consider that this project is comprised mostly of undergraduate students, not Ph.D. candidates. I sometimes wonder if today’s top undergraduate scientists at the top schools are equivalent in their course of study to many Ph.D. candidates of 20 or 30 years ago).
The crux of the project is to have students on the team take pre-packaged “biobricks” of genes provided to them in kits, and manipulate them into their own unique combination of DNA that exhibits a desired biological effect. For the Stanford entry in the competition, they are using gene stacks to create a functional bacterium “engineered to treat inflammatory diseases by balancing immune system cells in the intestine.” They’re calling this gene stack a “machine,” a genetically powered unit that is introduced into the body to perform a task. It’s part of a field known as “synthetic biology” which was discussed on Balanced Immune Health.com in an earlier post.
According to the Stanford release:
“One of the symptoms of bowel disease is a disruption in the ratio of two different types of T-cells, Th17 and T-regulatory cells, which are a part of your immune system,” explained Suzanne Bartram, a sophomore member of the team. “Th17 cells have been known to increase levels of nitric oxide in the body, which leads to inflammation.
“The students are designing the machine to detect the cause of inflammation and release a counteracting acid. ‘We’re going to engineer the bacteria to secrete retinoic acid, which is shown to down-regulate Th17. This will bring the population of cells back down to a stable balance called homeostasis and decrease inflammation,’ she said.”
Maintaining immune balance, decreasing inflammation, it all sounds familiar to readers of this blog. My only question: can the same effect–immune system balance in the gut–be achieved through ongoing nutrition and lifestyle regimens that may also render a more balanced cellular population and response to threats that enter the body?
