Blocking fatty acid–fueled mROS production within macrophages alleviates acute gouty inflammation
Chris J. Hall, Leslie E. Sanderson, Lisa M. Lawrence, Bregina Pool, Maarten van der Kroef, Elina Ashimbayeva, Denver Britto, Jacquie L. Harper, Graham J. Lieschke, Jonathan W. Astin, Kathryn E. Crosier, Nicola Dalbeth, and Philip S. Crosier published a paper titled ‘Blocking fatty acid–fueled mROS production within macrophages alleviates acute gouty inflammation’
Chris from our Department of Molecular Medicine and Pathology lead the study (recently published in the high impact journal The Journal of Clinical Investigation) with several of his colleagues, including Professor Nicola Dalbeth, an academic rheumatologist in the faculty and an internationally recognised expert in gout research.
Chris says the study is of particular significance to Aotearoa/New Zealand, as Māori and Pacific people have the highest prevalence of gout worldwide.
This work also recently received funding from the Health Research Council of New Zealand in the 2017 funding round to exploit these new findings and identify new anti-inflammatory treatments for gout.
Read the paper here.
PilVax – a novel peptide delivery platform for the development of mucosal vaccines
Dasun Wagachchi, Catherine Tsai, Callum Chalmers, Sam Blanchett, Jacelyn Loh and Thomas Proft published an article entitled ‘PilVax – a novel peptide delivery platform for the development of mucosal vaccines’.
In this paper they showed that the group A streptococcus serotype M1 pilus structure (PilM1) can be expressed on the surface of the food-grade bacterium Lactococcus lactis with the addition of selected peptides within certain loop regions of the monomeric pilus fiber protein. Assembly of the pilus by polymerisation of the pilus fiber protein results in amplification of the inserted peptide and a strong increase in peptide antigenicity and peptide stability. PilVax may be useful as a cost-effective platform for the development of peptide vaccines against a variety of important human pathogens.
The article was published in the multidisciplinary journal “Scientific Reports”.
Read the paper here.