Research Continues to Find New Therapy Against Functional Dyspepsia

General medical practitioner from Sydney, Australia, Dr. Nick Catsaras leverages over three decades of experience in the fields of information technology and finance in his role as managing director of Pegasus Research. As a medical doctor, Nick Catsaras, MD, maintains an interest in medical research efforts, particularly in gastrointestinal diseases.

A group of neurogastroenterology researchers at the Translational Research Institute Australia (TRI) led by Professor Gerald Holtmann is pursuing a study that would characterize the immunopathology of functional dyspepsia (FD). The study, which was funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council, aims to develop a new therapeutic strategy that will deal with FD.

Recently, the researchers have discovered that FD is associated with the enlargement of activated eosinophils in the duodenum in 47 percent of FD patients. The group has also observed an abnormal immune activation in the peripheral blood of FD patients. These observations led the researchers to hypothesize that FD might be an immune-mediated disease, with allergic type Th2 as driver. The team will try this hypothesis by evaluating the roles of T-cell phenotype, including the levels of eosinophilic chemokines and cytokines in FD patients.

The study is expected to proceed in defining the causal roles of Th2 cells, including the factors that promote eosinophil in driving duodenal eosinophil in FD. The efforts will focus on profiling gene expressions in order to define new mechanisms. The resulting therapeutic modality will suppress overactive immune responses in FD.