The road to discovery is paved with good muffins

Need something to help reduce inflammation? Prof Luke O'Neill and his team may be able to help you there. Prof O'Neill is Ireland's leading expert on the immune system, and a recipient of the RDS Irish Times Boyle Medal for Scientific Excellence. He has forged an enviable international reputation thanks to his groundbreaking work on boosting our understanding of how the immune system works. I'm going to spend a day with him and his research team as they search for ways to combat such inflammatory diseases as rheumatoid arthritis, colitis, Crohn's disease, diabetes and cancer. So, no pressure.

My destination is the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI), a brand new building on Pearse Street that has been built with one goal in mind: to make scientific discoveries that will directly help in the understanding and treatment of a range of diseases.

Now that’s serious ambition. And no better man than Prof O’Neill to take on the role of academic director of the TBSI, along with his other duties as head of the Inflammation Research Group and chair of biochemistry at TCD. You could call him the Bono of biomedicine, as he’s equally charismatic, though he is about twice the size of the U2 frontman.

He’s also plainly infected with a common inflammatory condition: rock’n’roll fever. He likes his music and, when he’s not blinding you with complex biomedical data, he’s dazzling you with his encyclopedic knowledge of classic rock. When I meet him, he’s just back from a conference on immune-based therapies in Cleveland, Ohio, but the highlight of his trip was a visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

“Did you know it was originally planned to be in New York, but Cleveland was chosen because it was the home town of Alan Freed, the DJ who coined the term rock’n’roll?” No, I did not know that. And I’m a so-called rock journo.

Pretty soon, I’m going to find out just how little I know about the workings of the human immune system, but at least I’m going to learn a very important skill: how to use a pipette to measure out minuscule quantities of cell culture.

Pipettes are basic tools of the trade – everyone has their own, and woe betide you if you use someone else’s without permission. By the end of the day, I reckon I might just be the Eric Clapton of pipetting.

New discoveries
Inflammation is a hot topic right now, and new discoveries are being made on a regular basis. Ireland is a world superpower in immunology right now, so the research work Prof O'Neill and his team are doing is bearing fruit. The next step is to take the findings and develop new treatments for inflammatory diseases, so he set up drug- development company Opsona, which recently raised €33 million in financing.

The immunologists’ typical day begins with an injection of sucrose and caffeine, via a giant plate of delicious muffins, cookies and flapjacks, which are passed around the team while they sip their lattes from the coffee shop next door.

It’s the morning briefing, during which researchers take turns to bring the rest of the team up to speed on their work to date, and a strategy for the day’s research is worked out. This isn’t just fiddling around with test tubes full of coloured liquid, the research is results-focused, and every experiment is carried out with a view to achieving a clear outcome.

After the briefing, it's time to spend some time in the lab. "I suppose we'd better put on the lab coats, just for show," laughs Prof O'Neill, gesturing to a row of green coats hanging in the corner. I'm entering a realm where dangerous organisms such as salmonella and E.coli are kept. I can see the headline now: "Deadly Dublin 2 outbreak traced to clumsy Irish Times journalist." The less hazardous viruses – the ones that might only make you sneeze – are kept in open refrigerated units. The more dangerous ones are kept in more secure units, and handled with big, industrial-sized gloves. The really nasty ones are safely hidden away. But you can rest assured, there's nothing on the magnitude of ebola or Marburg in the TBSI, and nothing that's likely to turn the human race into flesh-eating zombies.

Sheer doggedness
The most infectious agent in this lab, however, is Prof O'Neill's boundless enthusiasm, which has plainly spread through his entire team. "I love the thrill of medical discovery," he tells me. "The idea of seeing something that hasn't been seen before."

It takes plenty of doggedness to reach the point of discovery, though. “Eighty per cent of the time, you’re failing. You could be working six months in the lab and have nothing to show for it. But when you hit the jackpot, it’s hugely exciting.”

Over the next couple of hours, I am shown how cell cultures are grown for use in conducting experiments (they are tricked into thinking they are in someone’s body); how the cells are separated using a centrifuge (load the centrifuge wrongly, and it could rip itself apart); and how they are sorted using a FACS machine (a bargain at half a million euro).

All the work done today it is hoped will add to the knowledge bank, and go towards finding treatments for inflammatory diseases.

And who knows, maybe my little bit of pipetting will contribute. "Irish Times journo helps find cure for major diseases" – now I like the sound of that.

Civil war: when the immune system turns on itself
When infection attacks the body, the immune system kicks into defence, sparking off inflammation that zaps the hostile bugs. But sometimes, the immune system goes a bit mad and sends white blood cells to kill off healthy cells.

Prof Luke O’Neill likens this process to civil war: your immune system has turned upon itself, putting the body into jeopardy. If a way can be found to switch off the auto-immune response, says O’Neill, it would be help in combatting such inflammatory diseases as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, herpes and type-2 diabetes.

O’Neill’s team has been studying receptors involved in immunity, and unravelling the signals that activate them. They have had some exciting results. Working with researchers from 10 universities around the globe, O’Neill found a way to block the effects of blood poisoning in mice, by using a drug normally prescribed for epilepsy in humans. This process has great potential.

For scientists and researchers, the holy grail is getting findings published in Nature, an international journal of science. O’Neill’s collaborative article has a rather unwieldy title – “Succinate is an inflammatory signal that induces IL-1ß through HIF-1a” – and the text is nigh-on impossible to fathom, unless you are a molecular biologist, but for O’Neill and his team, it’s as good as getting on the cover of Rolling Stone. And it may result in a drug that could help the likes of Mick and Keef with rheumatoid arthritis.

Kevin Courtney