British scientists are leading an ambitious £50 million research programme aimed at moving medicine beyond simply managing chronic inflammatory diseases, towards treatments which could one day offer patients lasting remission, or even a cure.
The new MRC Centre of Research Excellence in Restorative Immunology will be led by the University of Birmingham, bringing together some of the country’s leading scientists and clinicians in a major long-term effort to tackle diseases affecting millions of people.
The Medical Research Council is investing £50 million in the centre over the next 14 years, with researchers setting their sights on understanding why the immune system turns against healthy tissue, and how that process might be reversed.
It is another demonstration of the extraordinary scientific expertise found in Britain’s universities, hospitals and research institutions, and could ultimately help transform the lives of people living with painful and debilitating conditions.
More than four million people in the UK are estimated to suffer from immune-mediated inflammatory diseases, known as IMIDs.
They include inflammatory arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmune liver disease and Sjögren’s disease, and can affect both children and adults.
The conditions develop when the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissue, potentially affecting the joints, gut, skin, eyes, liver and salivary glands.
For patients, the consequences can be devastating, including chronic pain, irreversible damage to tissues and organs, and lifelong disability.
Despite huge advances in medicine, there are currently no cures for these conditions, meaning many patients depend upon medication throughout their lives to suppress inflammation and prevent further damage.
The economic consequences are substantial too. There is no single figure covering the total cost of all immune-mediated inflammatory diseases to the NHS, but inflammatory bowel disease alone has been estimated to cost the health service as much as £900 million a year.
Britain at the forefront of the search for cures
The new centre wants to change the way scientists think about treating these diseases.
Rather than simply controlling inflammation after it develops, researchers will investigate the underlying biological mechanisms which cause disease and allow it to continue.
Their ultimate ambition is to develop precision treatments capable of resetting the immune system and helping damaged tissue return to a healthy state.
Scientists will first produce detailed maps showing what happens inside human tissue as disease develops.
They will examine how different cells are organised, how they communicate with one another, and how these relationships alter as healthy tissue becomes diseased.
Researchers will then use that information to build models of human tissue in laboratories, allowing them to investigate harmful interactions between cells and test potential ways of disrupting them.
The final goal will be to turn those discoveries into precision treatments which restore immune balance and encourage damaged tissue to heal, potentially reducing, or even eliminating, patients’ dependence on lifelong medication.
Birmingham leads international scientific team
At the heart of the project will be the University of Birmingham, supported by an impressive collection of British institutions.
Researchers from Newcastle University, University College London, the University of Bristol, the University of Cambridge, the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford will participate, alongside scientists from Kyoto University in Japan.
Charities, industry, patient research partners and public engagement organisations will also contribute to the programme.
The scale of the collaboration underlines the depth of scientific talent Britain continues to possess, from its universities and medical schools to its clinicians, laboratories and life sciences sector.
Professor Adam P Croft, Arthritis UK Chair of Rheumatology and Director of the new centre, said major progress had been made in controlling inflammatory diseases during the past 20 years, but existing approaches did not tackle the mechanisms responsible for causing and sustaining disease.
He said patients wanted researchers to go further than lifelong management, and pursue the possibility of cures.
Professor Croft added that new technology was allowing scientists to study human tissues at unprecedented levels of detail, giving researchers the opportunity to identify the cells and molecular pathways driving disease.
He said the combination of these advances and increasingly precise therapies created a realistic opportunity to move towards treatments intended to cure disease and restore lasting health.
‘It could change lives’
For patients who have spent much of their lives knowing their condition cannot currently be cured, that possibility is particularly powerful.
Caitlin, from Birmingham, was diagnosed with psoriatic juvenile idiopathic arthritis at the age of 11, after living with psoriasis from childhood.
She said her condition was now well controlled with medication which suppresses her immune system, but she faces the prospect of taking powerful drugs, carrying significant risks, for the rest of her life.
Speaking about the prospect of research eventually producing a cure, she said it was “truly incredible”, adding that it could change lives and spare others some of the challenges she has faced.
Dr Ceri Williams, Executive Director of Challenge Led Portfolio at the Medical Research Council, said the centre had the potential to transform scientific understanding of inflammatory disease and accelerate the development of treatments capable of delivering lasting benefits for patients.
The centre forms part of a wider series of MRC Centres of Research Excellence working on some of medicine’s most difficult challenges.
Other centres are already examining advanced cardiac therapies, therapeutic genomics, restorative neural dynamics, clinical trial innovation, mitochondrial genome therapies and the relationship between environmental exposures and chronic inflammatory disease.
Britain has a long and distinguished history of medical discovery, and this latest project places British researchers once again at the forefront of the search for treatments which could change millions of lives.
For those living with chronic inflammatory disease, the prize could hardly be greater, a future in which medicine does not simply keep their illness under control, but tackles its cause and, ultimately, gives patients the possibility of being free from it.
Main Image: For illustration purposes.
