Photo has been emailed to your picture desk. Colin Watts is available by phone for interview today.
University of Dundee scientists are playing a major role in an international study which has just won half a million Euros to further its groundbreaking work to understand multiple sclerosis.
The EU Descartes Prize is a highly prestigious award, aimed to encourage the best researchers and teams to become involved in and be committed to European Research. The prize recognises the collaborative nature of research that is at the heart of any major scientific breakthrough.
Colin Watts, Professor of Immunobiology in the University's School of Life Sciences is a member of the winning international collaborative effort which also involved labs in Denmark, Norway, Oxford and the USA.
He says "Autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) 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 it 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 crucially 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.
Colin continued, "Overall, this project has illustrated very clearly the importance of collaboration. Each of the labs involved had particular expertise and it was effectively brought together to address some key questions.
"The work will refocus attention on the T cells that drive autoimmune disease as we begin to harness this knowledge to develop new drugs to quench their activity or eliminate them."
Colin Watts is Head of the Division of Cell Biology and Immunology at the Wellcome Trust Biocentre. His laboratory has been based in Dundee since 1986 and is supported by the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council and by collaborations with industry.
This year two projects in the field of medicine and astrophysics shared the _1 million Descartes prize. Total entries for the Descartes Prize reached 108 - double that of last year.
Colin Watts 01382 344233
By Jane Smernicki, Press Officer 01382 344768 j.m.smernicki@dundee.ac.uk