This painful skin disease could soon be tamed

By Tom Campbell via SWNS

A painful skin disease affecting millions of people could soon be tamed, according to a new study.

Targeting a protein called TWEAK - which damages skin cells in psoriasis patients -could help control the disease, say scientists.

Psoriasis is an autoimmune condition which shows up as patches of red, inflamed skin and painful, scaly rashes.

While effective treatments are available, not everyone responds to them and for many relief is temporary.

Now, scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) in California may have found a solution to their problem.

"These therapies don't reduce disease by 100 percent, and they don't cure the disease," said author professor Michael Croft.

"And if you take patients off those drugs, the disease almost always comes back."

In a previous study, the TWEAK protein was found to interact with the most common type of skin cell, known as a keratinocyte.

They also discovered it was a driver of psoriasis after carrying out experiments on TWEAK-deficient mice, but it did not work alone.

Two other proteins called tumor necrosis factor (TNF) and interleukin-17 (IL-17) also helped trigger the disease, which affects around 1.1 million people in the UK.

"The fact that they work together suggests the disease is essentially driven by all three of those particular proteins at the same time," Croft said.

"The primary implication is that TWEAK will also be a good drug target as has already been proven for TNF and IL-17."

This was confirmed after the researchers tested all three treatments on mice.

"If you inhibit TWEAK from working on its receptor on keratinocytes, you get the same therapeutic effect as when you inhibit TNF or IL-17," said co-author Dr. Rinkesh Gupta.

These findings are especially encouraging because treatments which target TNF and IL-17 have already been FDA-approved.

Targeting TWEAK could also provide a treatment for many types of skin diseases, although clinical trials have not been conducted, the researchers say.

"We think TWEAK is involved in skin inflammation in general," Croft said.

The researchers have already started investigating its effects on eczema, a very common type of skin condition, especially in babies and young children.

"While psoriasis and atopic dermatitis are distinct diseases, they do have a few things in common and there are not as many good treatments for atopic dermatitis," Gupta said.

"There's certainly a lot of room for improvement in treatment of atopic dermatitis patients."

The findings were published in the journal Science Immunology.