Inspiration literally everywhere!
Are you easily ticked off? (pun intended)
Well now scientists’ new found inspiration are the Ticks. Ticks are pretty creepy creatures if you ask me. Climbing and fastening themselves to you in order to feed off of you!
“With this latest research, we hope to be able to take inspiration from the tick’s anti-inflammatory strategy and design a life-saving therapy for this dangerous heart condition. We may also be able to use the same drugs to treat other diseases where inflammation plays a big part, such as heart attack, stroke, pancreatitis, and arthritis.” Says Professor Shoumo Bhattacharya, the new study’s lead author and Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford.
Myocarditis contributes to the cause of about 43% of all heart transplants in the US and is believed to be the reason behind 5-20% of sudden deaths in young adults.
It is an inflammatory disorder of the heart muscle also called myocardium in medical terminology. It is caused by viral infections, and over several thousands are diagnosed with myocarditis every year.
The study, funded by the British Heart Foundation has identified a protein called the Evasin within tick saliva that can bind to and neutralize several
chemicals called Chemokines, which are released in the heart during an inflammation or myocarditis. These chemical is known to attract cells which cause inflammation; therefore by neutralizing them, tick saliva could potentially prevent this inflammation itself.The saliva is found to contain around 1,500 to 3,000 proteins depending on the tick species, and the researchers have formulated a “bug to drug” plan wherein hundreds of these saliva proteins are made into yeast cells, in order to identify the tick saliva proteins that have anti-inflammatory properties. Which are then injected into the host where they go ahead and block the host’s chemokines, as a result preventing the painful inflammation.
The study has already identified several new tick evasins and proved that one of them, P991_AMBCA, from the cayenne tick found in the US, can bind to and block the effect of chemokines which is responsible for myocarditis, heart attack and stroke.
Dr.Bhattacharya also believes that if such drugs are developed, they may also be able to “treat other diseases where inflammation plays a big part, such as heart attack, stroke, pancreatitis, and arthritis.”
“They may not be pretty, but these little creatures could hold the secret to better treatments for a whole range of diseases,” said Professor Jeremy Pearson, a member of the team. “There’s a long way to go, but tick saliva looks like an exciting, albeit unconventional, area of research.”
