The radical idea offering hope for millions of Aussies suffering from autoimmune disease
Professor Chris Goodnow, Deputy Director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, talks about the radical idea that’s offering hope for millions of Australians currently suffering from autoimmune disease.
Autoimmune diseases are on the rise in Australia, and fast becoming a problem for our already-stretched healthcare system. One in 8 people will be affected by an autoimmune disease like arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes and coeliac disease at some point in their life. These conditions can have a devastating effect, not just on patients, but on their family members and friends as well.
While much about autoimmune disease remains a mystery, early findings from research at the Garvan Institute offers hope, with many believing it it may lead to a cure.
What we know about autoimmune disease
Most of our understanding of autoimmune disease is restricted to what’s going on in the body. We know autoimmune disease occurs when the body attacks and damages its own tissue, we know the symptoms, we have methods to manage these diseases as best we can, and we know what to expect when someone’s diagnosed. What’s less clear, and what the Garvan Institute’s Hope Research project is trying to answer, is why the immune system is doing this, and whether this is curable.
How close are we to understanding causes?
The encouraging news is we’re closer to an understanding than we’ve ever been, which could one day lead to a cure. The Garvan Institute has been leading the way in autoimmune disease research, thanks largely to work spearheaded by a radical hypothesis from the organisation’s Deputy Director, Professor Chris Goodnow.
Over a decade ago, Professor Goodnow theorised that there was a common cause for all autoimmune diseases – disruptions in the immune system’s clever “checkpoint” process causing “rogue clone” cells to spread and replicate.
The technology to put this theory to the test didn’t exist previously. But recent advances have given Professor Goodnow and his team the ability to isolate individual disease-causing cells from the blood of patients and target the “rogue clones”. And this has far-reaching implications of the management and treatment of these diseases.
“For the last 10 years, we’ve had a pretty good idea as to what might cause autoimmune disease, and we’ve figured out many of the mechanisms that normally stop it. But we haven’t had the tools and the technology to be able to test those ideas,” Professor Goodnow explains.
“In the last three years, we’ve acquired the tools and technology here at the Garvan Institute. We are now bringing them together with a fantastic team of medical experts at the major hospitals around Sydney to really focus those tools and know-how on cracking this problem.”
Why it’s important to understand the causes of autoimmune disease
While many autoimmune diseases can be managed, there’s yet no cure. But the revolutionary research from Professor Goodnow and the team at the Garvan Institute suggests this is about to change. If researchers can pin down the “rogue cells” and what prompted them to go rogue, they could theoretically use existing immunotherapies and drugs to eradicate them from the body, targeting the disease at the source.
The Garvan Institute has already made exciting strides through the work of Dr Joanne Reed, who put Professor Goodnow’s theory to the test in a pilot study for Sjögren’s syndrome. The results she recorded were nothing short of spectacular.
“Excitingly, our pilot study has already identified disease causing rogue clones in Sjögren’s syndrome,” Dr Reed says.
“We’ll now apply this discovery to 36 clinically diverse autoimmune diseases.”
The challenges of this revolutionary research?
As is often the case, progress in the world of science doesn’t come cheap. The costs associated with the Hope Research project’s revolutionary work are substantial.
“To identify the rogue cells in one person costs thousands of dollars; to identify the mutations in those rogue cells costs $5,000-$20,000. It will get cheaper the more we do it, and the more the technology continues to mature,” Professor Goodnow says.
“You could say we should just wait 10 years, until the technology has gotten cheaper, but we can’t wait. We want to know the root cause of autoimmune disease now. We’ve got the technology. We know what we need to do. We just need the resources to do it.”
How you can help
Contributing funds to the Garvan Institute is a good way to start, and you’ll be surprised how far your dollar goes to tackling autoimmune disease.
As Professor Goodnow says, “For every dollar you give, we will leverage that many, many times over, in terms of being able to reach a cure for these diseases.”
You can contribute to Garvan’s fight against autoimmune disease. Visit garvan.org.au/give-hope