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news.A team of international researchers has discovered that a specific gene on chromosome 15 plays a role in regulating inflammation, a finding with implications for a wide range of disorders, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's, and infections.
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The investigators, that published findings from the study in Nature Genetics, believe this discovery will be of great interest to biomedical and pharmaceutical researchers because of an already heightened understanding of the role of inflammation in so many human disorders.
“Practically every common disease involves an inflammation component,” said Dr John Blangero, a scientist at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (SFBR) in San Antonio and the paper’s senior author. “So the discovery of a new player in the inflammation pathway opens up many potential avenues for intervention on a broad range of health issues.”
The research study identified the gene, SEPS1, as a type of “garbage truck” that helps clear cells of misfolded proteins that build up when cells are placed under stress, Blangero said. Inflammation develops when those faulty proteins accumulate in a cell. People with a genetic variation that impairs SEPS1’s ability to purify the cells by clearing out the bad proteins tend to suffer higher levels of inflammation than people in whom the gene fulfills that role more efficiently, according to the study.