Celiac
Gluten is this great big amorphous mass of mixed and cross-linked protein molecules found in wheat, a molecule that we didn’t evolve with. There’s a suspicion that the immune system in Celiacs can mistake it for some sort of virus that has come to kill us.
Consequently, the immune system prevents gluten from entering the body by damaging the villi in the gut. A harsh but effective approach (sort of something like Putin would do). However the body knows that the villi can recover once the “virus” has gone away, so it’s worth the short term damage.
But the problem doesn’t go away. Gluten keeps getting consumed.
In buggering up the villi, the host body can suffer from malnutrition and starvation.
So the only current solution is to stop ingesting gluten.
Other solutions are in the works, such as digestible enzymes that predigest gluten before it crosses into the blood system, and fancy molecules that act to prevent gluten crossing through the villi.
Diagnosis is fraught and relies on;
1. Gluten related health issues
2. Endoscopy looking for villi damage
3. Blood serum tests for immune markers and nutrition related issues (e.g. anaemia)
4. Certain genetic markers that predispose people to the condition
5. And get this … the effectiveness of a gluten free diet on fixing one or more of 1-3 of the above. That’s the snake eating it’s own tail.
Now the issue here is the difficulty in avoiding gluten: with 8 billion people or so on the planet, we simply couldn’t feed them all on a gluten free diet. There’s not enough resources on the planet to do so. That’s how ubiquitous gluten is.
Also many of these immune responses are down at the ppm level, so even minute cross-contamination can be an issue.
To make matters worse, there’s a cohort of gluten intolerant folk that don’t have the autoimmune disease that is Celiac Disease. Research has shown that these people actually don’t digest wheat carbohydrates very well, thus the carbs ferment in their guts causing their issues. Gluten is simply a food marker for the problematic carbs.
These guys aren’t sensitive to ppm levels of wheat products. And that has become a supply chain issue for Celiacs.
Personally I think the solution is to re-train the immune system to behave differently when it detects gluten. It’s doable.
Looking at other diseases, scientists have shown that the immune system can be tricked into recognising nasty proteins by presenting it with repeated doses of a highly soluble fragment of the protein that the white blood cells respond to. By repeatedly injecting the same fragment of the proteins, the process whereby the immune system learns to distinguish between the body’s own proteins and those that are foreign can be mimicked.
For Celiacs, we’ve just got to train the body in the opposite way, to recognise gluten as one of its own and not a foreign invader.
I’d start by developing a series of modified glutens for injection. Starting further away from gluten and slowly getting closer, thus teaching the immune system to calm the fuck down.
Or we could put gluten in an inhaler. The body isn’t stupid, if the gluten is coming in via the lungs it won’t shut down the stomach. But the immune system can bugger up the lungs as well, so that’s a ‘maybe’ at best.
Or, figure out which virus that gluten is imitating and come up with a vaccine. It’s possible that the virus disappeared thousands of years ago, in which case you just synthesise one.
offshore westerly 