Researchers in the school of life sciences are playing a major role in an international study which has just won half a million euros to further its work understanding multiple sclerosis.
Colin Watts, professor of immunobiology is a member of the winning international collaborative effort involving labs in Denmark, Norway, Oxford and the USA.
The EU Descartes Prize is a highly prestigious award, aimed at encouraging the best researchers and teams to become involved in European research. The prize recognises the collaborative nature of research that is at the heart of any major scientific breakthrough.
Colin explains: "Autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis occur when the body makes a sustained immune response against one or more of our own body constituents. In the case of MS it is the myelin sheath that surrounds our nerves and spinal cord that is attacked. Because the target of the attack cannot be eliminated, unlike an invading bacterium or virus, the autoimmune response may persist over many years leading to tissue damage and disability. Why do some of us get autoimmune disease? We still cannot be sure although we know that it involves the activation of T lymphocytes that have escaped the normal process whereby we become ‘tolerant’ to our body components."
The group of European labs honoured by this year’s Descartes Prize have brought together several pieces of new information concerning our susceptibility to multiple sclerosis. The Dundee lab’s contribution was to identify a new mechanism which may explain how some of the T lymphocytes that cause MS, escape into the body. This was dependent on reagents and know-how provided by other labs both within and outside the consortium. In work performed by other members of the consortium it was shown that a fragment of a virus looks very like a fragment of myelin thus confusing the immune system about what is foreign and what is self.
The work will refocus attention on the T cells that drive autoimmune disease as the knowledge is harnessed to develop new drugs to quench their activity or eliminate them.