People with celiac disease must navigate everyday life by avoiding gluten, a protein in wheat, rye and barley which can trigger painful symptoms in the gut, impede the absorption of nutrients and raise the risk of other serious long-term issues. The autoimmune disorder affects about 1 per cent of the population. Its rate of occurrence has roughly doubled in the past 25 years, but there is no treatment available.
An interdisciplinary team of medical and engineering researchers centered at Canada's McMaster University and including colleagues from the US, Australia, and Argentina, has spent the last six years working to unlock a significant piece of the puzzle in the search for a cure: how and where the gluten response begins. It had previously been thought that the inflammatory response to gluten occurred inside the gut wall and exclusively involved immune cells, but In a new paper published today in the journal Gastroenterology , the team has shown there is more to the story. They found that the inner lining of the upper intestine, called the "epithelium" –composed of a variety of cells that are not classically part of the immune system – also plays an active role in directing the inflammatory response to gluten.
Using microscopic biomaterials in the laboratory, the team created a biologically functioning model of the intestinal epithelium which allowed the researchers to isolate the effects of specific molecules in the epithelial cells of people with celiac disease. The .