Worms not to be sneezed at

WORMS hold the key to new treatments for asthma and other allergic diseases, a leading scientist believes.

Dr Padraic Fallon in the School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and his team have just been awarded €1.68 million by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) to develop new treatments for allergies.

About half a million people in Ireland suffer from asthma. The country has the forth highest rate of asthma in the world and levels are increasing.

Dr Fallon’s research involves examining how the absence of parasitic worm infections in developed countries may predispose people to allergies.

The doctor’s immunology group already has extensive expertise in the area and previously discovered how to use worms to prevent disease in experimental models of anaphylaxis, asthma and inflammatory bowel disease.

The award to Dr Fallon will fund a team of five scientists that will investigate the mechanism that the worms use to suppress allergies as the next step towards developing new treatments.

The scientists recently made a breakthrough in identifying what it is about the worms that keeps allergies at bay.

“We are not advocating giving people live worms to eat, but our hypothesis is formed and we now are beginning to find a way that we can use worm therapy,” he said.