hepatitis, inflammation of the liver can be triggered by various factors: apart from the excessive, chronic alcohol consumption, chronic drug abuse or fungal toxins, is the infection by viruses, the most common cause of hepatitis in humans.
Worldwide over 600 million people suffer from an infection by hepatitis B or C viruses. The chronic inflammation of the liver can lead to liver cancer, also called hepatocellular carcinoma. It is the most common liver cancer in human and annually to about 500,000 deaths. The hepatozelluäre cancers take in recent years, especially in the industrialized countries of Europe and the USA.
"More than half of all liver cancer patients previously had chronic viral hepatitis," UZH explains researcher Mathias Heikenwälder. The microbiologist has discovered after five years of intensive research, such as the inflammatory process can be stopped in the liver and how the liver carcinogenesis be contained in a mouse model kann.Heikenwälder and his group based its research on an American study and our own experiments, in which liver tissue of virus-infected patients were studied. In their livers was a consistently higher concentration of the cytokines lymphotoxin α and β are shown. Previously it was unclear to whether this increase was in the development of chronic inflammation and liver cancer causally involved or whether the observed increase the result was.
crosses with genetically modified mice lacking B and T lymphocytes led not surprisingly to the formation of liver inflammation and liver cancer. An indication that the white blood cells must play an important role in the disease process.
For next year, the project team will conduct human clinical trials with a drug that was tested for other inflammatory diseases in humans have, and that the signal path of the lymphotoxin receptor blocked.
"We have to see whether blocking the receptor Lympothoxin decrease inflammation in the liver and viral replication can be prevented. That would be fantastic. "However, the relative Heikenwälder one can not expect a priori that all knowledge transferable from mouse to humans are.
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