Manipulating amok immune systems

Dr Greer, a senior research officer in the University of Queensland's Medicine Department at Royal Brisbane Hospital, has received a Foundation Research Excellence Award valued at $70,000.

She has also been awarded funding by the Australian Academy of Science to learn techniques with colleagues at the Universite Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France.

Dr Greer is an immunologist, interested in the processes which occur in auto-immune diseases, when the body literally turns on itself. Her particular interest is in multiple sclerosis (MS), a common inflammatory disease of the central nervous system affecting two million people worldwide, and about 10,000 to 20,000 people in Australia.

In MS, a person's own immune system starts to attack parts of the brain and spinal cord, causing lesions that prevent nerve impulses from passing from the brain to other parts of the body. The symptoms that people with MS develop can vary from one person to another, depending on where in the brain or spinal cord the lesions occur.

Dr Greer said the ultimate aim of her work was to learn more about the underlying mechanisms responsible for MS in order to assist researchers to tailor more specific treatments for the non-curable auto-immune disease. Current treatments for multiple sclerosis are aimed at non-specifically suppressing the immune system, and can have unwanted side effects.

Among other avenues of research, Dr Greer is examining a type of therapy involving the use of agents known as altered peptide ligands (APLs). This approach to therapy was discarded last year in the US when it produced adverse reactions in some people with MS. Dr Greer believes testing procedures may not have excluded all the possible modes of action of APLs, and will investigate these further.

Dr Greer is particularly interested in a protein in the central nervous system called PLP, and the role it might play in multiple sclerosis. US researcher Dr Marjorie Lees discovered PLP in the 1950s, and Dr Greer was fortunate to undertake her postdoctoral fellowship with her at Harvard Medical School from 1991 to 1994. She has been interested in PLP and its potential role as a target of auto-immune attack ever since.

Item provided courtesy of the University of Queensland.