Could the discovery of one protein possibly save millions of lives? Professor Luke O’Neill’s discovery of MAL has the potential to do just that. It offers a new horizon of hope to the three million children who die of Malaria in the developing world every year, to the 146,000 who die of Sepsis in the EU and to sufferers of the painful and debilitating disease Rheumatoid Arthritis. At the very least it is a vital new key to understanding the human immune system.
We will feature interviews with Professor Adrian Hill in Oxford who has recently collaborated with Luke in the race to find a malaria vaccine. Their efforts funded by the Gates Foundation have yielded extraordinary results and were published to great acclaim in ‘Nature’ magazine 2007.
Meanwhile in Imperial College London and Sheffield University Professors Brian Foxwell and Gerry Wilson are each applying research into MAL to the development of future treatments for arthritis. In the Netherlands we meet Dr Mihai Netea who is working both against Arthritis with which he has had some very promising results in animal models and to try and eliminate sepsis, the biggest killer in the Western world.