2019/01/15
Keio University School of Medicine
Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED)
A research group led by Professor Takanori Kanai and Senior Lecturer Nobuhiro Nakamoto of the Department of Internal Medicine (Gastroenterology), Keio University School of Medicine, and Professor Toshiro Sato of The Sakaguchi Laboratory (Organoid Medicine), has discovered that three types of gut bacteria that cause the activation of TH17 cells in the liver are present at a high frequency in the stool of patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), an intractable autoimmune disease with few effective treatments other than liver transplantation. They successfully demonstrated in mice that one of these, Klebsiella bacteria, perforates the colonic epithelium, destroying the intestinal barrier, and migrates to lymph nodes outside the intestinal tract, inducing an excessive immune response in the liver. Furthermore, it was shown that the TH17 immune response occurring in the livers of these mice was reduced to about 30% by eliminating the Klebsiella bacteria with antibiotics. These findings indicate the possibility that these three gut bacteria are a cause of liver inflammation and demonstrate the mechanism, and are expected to lead to the development of new therapeutic and diagnostic agents for PSC that target gut bacteria.
The results of this research were published in the online edition of the international academic journal "Nature Microbiology" on January 14, 2019 (Greenwich Mean Time).
Please see below for the full press release.