Skip to main content
Search

Bioelectronic medicine: immunomodulation by vagus nerve stimulation

Published on September 26, 2019   27 min

A selection of talks on Immunology

Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
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.
0:36
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.

Quiz available with full talk access. Request Free Trial or Login.

Show
Hide

Bioelectronic medicine: immunomodulation by vagus nerve stimulation

Embed in course/own notes