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I'm Paul Peter Tak,
I'm a Professor of Medicine at the Amsterdam University Medical Center.
What if I told you that you can treat chronic immune mediated
inflammatory disease by electrons rather than by small molecules?
In other words, what if I told you that we can treat patients with
bio-electronic medicine rather than with tablets or injections?
Well, we can, and that's what I'm going to show you,
and I will show you how we got to this discovery in chronic autoimmune disease.
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It starts with the identification of factors that are involved in
the modulation of the response in rheumatoid arthritis in
the key effective cell called the fibroblast-like synoviocytes
and we obtained synovial tissue samples from patients with active rheumatoid arthritis,
so they have an actively inflamed joint with pain and swelling,
and we obtained these samples using arthroscopy.
Then in the lab,
we cultured these fibroblast-like synoviocytes,
we seeded them using a library of more than 2,000
adenoviral shRNAs against 807 transcripts.
Then five days after transduction,
we added TNF to the medium and read out the production of key
cytokines/chemokine involved in the pathogenesis
of rheumatoid arthritis namely Interleukin 8,
and we also looked at the production of degrading enzymes,
matrix metalloproteinases because these are involved in
the destruction of the bone and cartilage in rheumatoid arthritis,
which is a chronic inflammatory disease of the joints.
