ROME – Two new ways are opening up to overcome "bread sickness".
Medical research on celiac disease (gluten intolerance affecting 75,000 people in Italy) presented yesterday at the International Congress in Genoa a pill and a vaccine, which from different directions are trying to lay siege to the disease. The road best defined today is that of the pill. A tablet to be swallowed before a meal prevents the immune system from coming into contact with gluten, preventing inflammation and damage to the intestine. The new drug is making rapid progress in human trials.
In the battery of tests that just concluded in the United States, 83 percent of celiac patients managed to eat bread and pasta without any signs of an immune reaction. The latest phase of trials will begin in 2009 and should be completed in a couple of years. The inventor of the pill against "bread sickness" is Alessio Fasano, a young scientist from Salerno who today directs the Celiac Research Center of the University of Maryland in Baltimore. The Italian Celiac Association invited him yesterday to the congress in Genoa.
«Let's imagine the intestine – he explains – as a vast carpet of cells. In the space between one cell and another there is a sort of gate, which generally must remain closed. In the case of celiac disease, the gates are always wide open. Gluten manages to slip into the empty spaces and meets the immune system, which recognizes it as a foreign element, activates and ends up destroying the carpet of cells in the intestine". The action of the pill is to close the mesh during digestion. "You have to remember to take it with every meal," explains Fasano. "But on the other hand it is an inexpensive drug, if we consider that a gluten-free meal costs five times as much as a normal meal".
The vaccine road, on the other hand, is longer. In two months, the first stage of the experiments will start at the Hall Institute in Parkville, Melbourne. "It would be the definitive solution, but the mechanism of action is more complex than the pill," admits Fasano. «With the vaccine, the body is exposed to small fragments of gluten. We think in this way to re-educate the immune system, convincing it to tolerate the protein in bread and pasta».
Other novelties of the research concern the way in which celiac disease develops in the body. The later children with the disease are exposed to gluten, for example, the fewer symptoms they experience as they grow up. «We then realized – continues Fasano – that the disease does not always arise in childhood. Sometimes we realize the problem late precisely because celiac disease triggers late. On the causes, a mystery. Whoever discovers them will deserve the Nobel Prize».
TO KNOW MORE www.celiac disease.it www.celiaccentral.org/Other/Alba_Article/481 www.celiacenter.org
La Repubblica of 09/20/2008, article by ELENA DUSI ed. national p. 22
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