Beekeepers Help the Development of New Treatments for Allergic Diseases

The immune system of the body is very clever. It consists of cells and chemicals all designed to protect us. It can differentiate between harmful and harmless substances that are foreign to the body (antigens). It springs into action when it spots a harmful antigen and ignores the harmless variety.

This ability to deal with friend and foe appropriately is governed by a tolerance mechanism in the immune system. It is extremely complex and still not yet fully understood. For our purposes it can be simplified using a military metaphor.

The immune response to an antigen is like an army engaging in battle. The officer in charge is called a T cell. The soldiers are a group of chemicals called cytokines. The army is controlled by a General, known as a T regulator cell.  As the name suggests, these control and suppress the action of the T cells and cytokines, and therefore determine the severity of the reaction. They are a vital part of an effective tolerance mechanism.

Allergic diseases are basically the result of a failure in this mechanism. It is reasonable to believe that better understanding of the mechanism will lead to the development of new and better treatments for allergies. Consequently, there is a lot of research into the process of T cell tolerance.

One piece of research has recently been published by a group of scientists at the Swiss Institute of Allergy and Asthma Research. They studied T cell response in beekeepers in and out of the beekeeping season. Beekeepers are an ideal subject because they are a group of people who are exposed to a high dose of allergen (bee venom) over a prolonged period.

None of the beekeepers were allergic to bee venom and they did not wear any protective clothing. During the first week of the beekeeping season each beekeeper was stung an average of 13 times which resulted in the typical skin response of redness, swelling and pain. Interestingly, after the first week and for the rest of the season, all the other stings resulted in a significantly milder response.

During the first week of the next beekeeping season the skin reactions to stings returned to the level of the previous year and once more declined thereafter. This pattern of acquired tolerance to the stings after the first week was repeated over the three consecutive years of the study.

Throughout the study the behaviour of the T cells and cytokines in the blood of the beekeepers was monitored. After the first week of stings it was seen that the activity of both of them changed. The discovery of this change has revealed important new insights into the tolerance mechanism of the immune system. It is another step towards the development of improved treatments for allergic diseases.

In vivo switch to IL-10-scereting T regulatory cells in high dose allergen exposure Meiler F, Zumkehr J, Klunker S et al Journal of Experimental Medicine 2008, Nov 10th 

 

Article Adapted By Dr Rupert Mason From An Original Press Release and Research Supplied With the Kind Permission of  Dr M Adkis, Head of Immunodermatology, Swiss Institute of Allergy and Asthma Research (SIAF), Davos, Switzerland

 

Page created: 4 December 2008