• Question: how confident are you that your DNA resaerch will show why entameda historyica is so dangerous and can cure to stop people dying?

    Asked by marden to Ian on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Ian Wilson

      Ian Wilson answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Hi marden,

      Thanks for the great question!

      At the end of the research, I don’t expect to be able to say “This gene is responsible for causing the disease” – things won’t be as clear-cut as that. For example, we know that even though one type of Entamoeba histolytica might be able to cause disease in one human, it won’t definitely be able to in another human. This makes things more complicated because it means that the way Entamoeba histolytica interacts with its human host affects how it causes disease.

      I am pretty confident though that I’ll be able to ID a list of genes that MIGHT be involved in causing the disease. These are likely to be ‘virulence genes’, which are genes involved in harming other cells or protecting the cell to which they belong. I have a massive list of these genes that I’m going through at the moment (there’s about 400 in the list!) to try and learn about them. Other researchers will then be able to use this list of possible drug targets and do more work with them to ID which are the most dangerous.

      So my work forms a very early step in designing drugs to stop Entamoeba histolytica from killing people. But I’m very confident that I’ll find out enough to be able to get people working in the right direction.

      Hope that answers your question. Any others, just ask away 🙂

      Ian

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