Hundreds of thousands of deaths each year are caused by asthma, a disease that affects more than 250 million people. A cure for the condition would change a lot of people's lives.
The beginnings of a long-term treatment for asthma have been found by scientists. It doesn't just try and treat the symptoms but actually targets one of the causes of those symptoms.
A stem cell called a pericyte is blocked from moving. When people with asthma have an allergic and inflammatory reaction, pericytes are found in the lining of blood vessels and can make breathing harder.
"We hope that by targeting the changes in the airway directly, we can eventually offer a more permanent and effective treatment than those already available, particularly for severe asthmatics who don't respond to steroids."
People with asthma have trouble breathing due to the constriction of their airway. Steroids can help by relaxing the airway, but they aren't a long-term solution.
If pericytes were stopped from traveling to the airway walls, there would be a decrease in the number of people who have trouble breathing.
The researchers were successful in getting at the pericytes. In tests on asthmatic mice, blocking the signal from thisprotein resulted in a reduction in symptoms in a week and a full cure in two weeks.
The researchers wrote in their paper that they were able to mitigate pericyte uncoupling from the airway.
The mice who had received the treatment had thinner airway walls. Researchers tested the effectiveness of the treatment on human tissue cells in a lab.
There are other forms of relief that could be coming for those with asthma. Scientists showed how a new class of immunotherapy drugs could be used as an asthma treatment a few months back, after hearing about an effective asthma vaccine that was in development.
Even if it's an exciting avenue of research, there's still a long way to go before this can be used as a treatment. The treatment needs to be developed and made safe to use in humans.
Further research is needed before we can begin to test this in people.
The research was published in a medical journal.
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