Novel therapies for chronic inflammatory diseases - Adriano Rossi

Inflammatory diseases and especially inflammatory lung diseases like chronic bronchitis and emphysema (COPD) and scarring conditions are responsible for a huge burden of illness and untimely deaths in the UK, but current treatments are at best poorly-effective.

Over the past 20 years the Rossi lab has been taking an alternative approach to harness the mechanisms by which some inflammatory responses are known to get better spontaneously. The lab has identified a mechanism by which key inflammatory cells called neutrophils can be made to 'commit suicide' and be removed silently by local scavenger cells called macrophages thereby reducing inflammation.

Unfortunately this suicide process is usually overcome by powerful survival factors present in the inflamed lung.  In new studies the lab has shown that a drug currently under clinical trial in cancer patients (R-roscovitine), causes induction of neutrophil suicide, even in the presence of survival factors, and leads to resolution of disease in  models of human inflammatory lung disease. 

Ongoing research seeks to define exactly how drugs such as R-roscovitine works, an approach which may lead to the discovery of other useful anti-inflammatory drugs.