• Question: can the immune system help cure ulcerative colitis?

    Asked by haris369 to Steph, Noel, Daniel on 6 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Noel Carter

      Noel Carter answered on 6 Mar 2015:

      Ulcerative colitis isn’t really my area of expertise so I may well know less than you if you have a particular interest in it. I have just had a look at wikipedia

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulcerative_colitis

      The causes are poorly understood but there are some interesting new treatments, the most interesting are fecal transplants to try and get good bacteria into the gut.

    • Photo: Stephanie Dyson

      Stephanie Dyson answered on 8 Mar 2015:

      This is a very interesting question. I work on Crohn’s disease which is often paired with ulcerative colitis under the heading inflammatory bowel disease. Both of these conditions are actually thought to be CAUSED by the immune system so any cure would have to either
      1) stop the immune system doing what it thinks it should be doing
      2) retune the immune system to attack the cells that are not doing the right thing.

      The first one is difficult because the immune system is identifying non-harmful bacteria etc as dangerous and reacting how it normally would to bacteria that really was harmful. If we stop it doing that then when it did encounter harmful behaviour it would be unable to fight it because we have basically turned off that response and that could make someone very ill.

      Retuning the immune system is more likely to hold a cure but it would probably require regular injections with vaccines that targeted the cells doing the wrong thing.

      So I guess you could say that rather than help cure ulcerative colitis, the immune system could stop causing it.

Comments