Asthma is a complex disease of the immune system triggered by both environmental and genetic causes. Systems biology approaches to science pioneered at ISB are specifically designed to answer such complex questions.
One reason that asthma is such a challenge to treat and/or prevent is that many researchers now believe it is an "epigenetic" disease. Such diseases result from environmental influences that generate gene alterations in otherwise healthy individuals, which can then be passed on to future generations as a hereditary disease. Recent research at ISB has found that a molecule called ATF 3 is at least partly responsible for moderating overactive immune responses that lead to asthma attacks. Scientists found that mice which have ATF 3 molecules experience mild asthma attacks, while those that lack ATF 3 experience very severe attacks. It turns out that the ATF 3 molecule limits the production of proteins in the lung which signal the body to make inflammatory cells that cause airway restriction.
Current asthma treatments focus on drug targets that appear much later in the molecular chain of events that lead to an asthma attack than does ATF 3 activation. Targeting ATF 3 could prevent production of the very proteins
ISB researchers are also working to unravel the entire molecular network involved in an asthma attack. By doing so, they hope to find new and earlier targets for treatment, and even strategies for predicting the onset of an attack or preventing one from occurring at all.
ADVANCING EFFORTS TO REENGINEER DAMAGED CELLS
When a circuit breaker trips in your home and the lights go out, you know exactly where to go to fix the problem. Find the breaker box, look for the tripped circuit (which is pretty simple to find) and reset it. On come the lights! Easy, right?
What would happen if there were breaker switches all along the electrical wire? The absence of a wiring diagram for these new breakers would make locating the tripped breakers almost impossible.
Recently scientists at ISB discovered that numerous such molecular switches ("promoters") exist within gene segments that contain the code (or directions) for making proteins – the molecular machines of a cell. This discovery of promoters inside the coding segment of genes demands a significant shift in what was a generally accepted view of the scientific community. It was thought that these promoters exist almost exclusively outside the protein-coding segments and rarely within.
The research, published by ISB Associate Professor Nitin Baliga and colleagues online
ISB Associate Professor
Nitin Baliga, PhD
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