Amoeba’s Crafty Tactics To Slip Past Immune System Check Points Discovered

Amoeba might just be a single celled organism, but it certainly has the potential to run havoc with your immune systemdefine, managing to dodge it successfully, by cleverly getting rid of the tell tale chemicals on its surface, says the latest research by US scientists.

The findings of the research are said to be important from the point of view of vaccine development for diseases like dysenterydefine, which claims thousands of lives every year in the US alone and around a million of them world wide.

The dodging techniques of amoeba are quite similar to those adopted by malarial parasites in entering the human body.

Scientists believe that though amoebic dysentery is curable once detected, a vaccine would prevent a person getting infected at all and the onset of the disease via the initial infection called bloody diarrhea, itself would never occur.

The bloody diarrhea claims 70,000 lives each year. Diarrhea is a condition involving, loose stools, occurring more than three times a day, resulting in loss of water from the body leading to dehydration, which if not taken care of in time can lead to death also.

Scientists have found that the amoebae can stay undetected in the body for years together even thought the body might not show symptoms of the infection all thanks to the chemical called – rhomboid enzyme carried by this single celled organism, which helps it fool the immune systemdefine.

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins and Stanford universities in the US, working on amoeba and malarial parasite discovered that this enzyme has the ability to get rid of a protein called lectin which they carry on their surface when they enter the host. Once inside they shed off this protein and as a result are able to go undetected in the immune system and remain there.

Dr Sin Urban, who led the study, said: "This is the first enzyme to be identified which looks like it could mediate immune system evasion."

The focus after this discovery would shift to finally make drugs targeting the rhomboid enzyme, in order to nip the problem in the bud.