Our Latest Work has Recently been Published in PloS Neglected and Tropical Diseases
Wan D, Ludolf F, Alanine DGW, Stretton O, Ali Ali E, et al. (2014) Use of Humanised Rat Basophilic Leukaemia Cell Line RS-ATL8 for the Assessment of Allergenicity of Schistosoma mansoni Proteins. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 8(9): e3124. doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0003124
The publication is the result of the collaboration between our group and Guilherme Oliveira’s group in Belo Horizonte and other key national and international collaborators (David Dunne and Colin Fitzsimmons in Cambridge and Ryosuke Nakamura in Tokyo).The work describes a novel approach suitable for genome-wide functional identification of allergens in S. mansoni and other parasites, paving the way for the identification of the Schistosoma allergome. We hope that this technique may lead to a better understanding of allergenicity, the immunological basis of host protection by anti –parasite IgE and to the development of safer anti-helminthic vaccines. The paper is available for free download on the
PloS NTD website or on our own
ResearchGate pages.Funding for this work came from the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, The European Society for Clinical Medicine and Infectious Disease and the International Society for infectious Disease, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq, Brazil), Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do estado de Minas Gerais (FAPEMIG, Brazil), the Gordon Memorial College Trust Fund (Arundel, UK) and our own School of Pharmacy's Strategic Research Committee through various bursaries, consumable and travel funds. We also wish to acknowledge the invaluable input and effort of School of Pharmacy 4th year project students Verity Catlow, Sophie Elizabeth Ward, Ilina Ismail and Rafaella Pontou in the early phases of this project.
Posted on Thursday 9th October 2014