My name is Trey Gieseck, and I'm a postdoctoral fellow
in Tom Wynn's lab in the Laboratory of Parasitic
Diseases. Most people aren't familiar with
the term fibrosis, but you can really think
of it as scarring. It's just a wound healing
response that is dysregulated, so it goes
above and beyond what's needed to repair the
tissue. Within the liver, fibrosis can be
caused by a wide variety of things, ranging from the
hepatitis C virus to chronic alcohol abuse
or even a fatty diet. In this study, we induced
fibrosis in mice using a parasitic infection
called Schistosoma mansoni. It's actually
a human pathogen as well that affects about
200 to 300 million people, mostly in sub-Saharan
Africa. And about 5-10 percent of those individuals
will go on to develop liver fibrosis. Previously,
we knew that a protein called interleukin
13 caused fibrosis within this parasitic infection.
When someone has fibrosis and they present
in the clinic, they usually have a wide variety
of symptoms, and oftentimes, a physician will
try to address each of these symptoms separately.
But what we found in this paper is that interleukin
13 is causing each of these symptoms together.
So rather than treating them separately, we
can just target interleukin 13 and eliminate
all of these together. We're really excited
with this paper because it lends support that
these treatments might actually be very efficacious
in a wide variety of diseases.
