How does hookworm cure asthma

During an allergy attack, immune cells trying to get rid of irritating particles like dust mites go overboard. This causes a lot of inflammation and contraction of smooth muscles, making people wheeze and cough. In asthma, the reaction becomes built in and can happen even when irritating particles are absent, said Navarro.

But hookworms secrete anti-inflammatory protein 2, or AIP-2, which re-wires the immune reaction from being pro-inflammatory to anti-inflammatory. The researchers also found that AIP-2 changed the composition of immune cells and prevented inflammation in human cells taken from the pricked skin of people with a dust mite allergy.

From the lungs, the critters were coughed up and then swallowed, making their way into his intestines. Part of the motivation for the stunt was to use new technology to show how hookworm infection is acquired.

But, for the first time ever, we used state-of-the-art imaging to watch the worms enter my body. Tests showed that Logan had an increase of eosinophils — a type of white blood cell and a sign of immune response to worms. Although his stomach pain persisted, Logan was able to enjoy a meal of pizza and breadsticks without the nauseating side effects. When a hookworm crawls into a human, it secretes chemicals that turn off the immune alarm bells and repair the tissue around it.

It limits its consumption of blood to a few drops a day and doesn't leave its offspring scattered all over its host's gut. Instead, it thoughtfully plants them in the host's poop to ensure an orderly exit from the body. Like a very conscientious cat burglar, the hookworm knows it's best served by not making a mess. Perhaps the adaptations that help the parasites stay hidden also benefit their host by reining in overactive immune systems.

New biologic drug tackles hard-to-control asthma. Thinking that they might be onto something, the researchers found 12 adults with celiac disease - a serious genetic disorder that causes an autoimmune response to gluten - who volunteered to have doctors infect them with a slimy, slithery hookworm.

It was important that the participants be adults, because even relatively benign parasites can cause serious problems for children, pregnant women and others. Navarro also warned people with autoimmune disorders that they should not attempt to infect themselves with a hookworm, no matter how debilitating their illness might be. Parasites are no joke. It was an intriguing result, but it's difficult to scale that kind of study. Only so many people are willing to have a parasite put inside them for science.

Lawrence's helminths could variously have been classified as a vaccine or a medical device into which category fall increasingly widely used maggots and leeches or a pharmaceutical. To begin with, because there had been no complaint about Lawrence's service from any of his clients, the FDA agent suggested he only needed to bring his website into compliance. The mood, however, changed on a second visit.

This is the first week of November. I decided on the spot we had no option but to leave. He and his new partner Michelle, who he had known since teenage days in Devon, made this decision in part because they feared for their liberty, but also because he felt he had a duty to his mission. And I believe we had a solution. The FDA left at 5. By 1am on Saturday Lawrence and Michelle were walking across the border into Mexico at Tijuana — where he knew there was no passport control — holding hands.

We went two days without food. Took a hour bus to Guadalajara, stayed in a hotel which turned out to be a whorehouse. We eventually calmed down enough to get a plane to Cancun, and a bus to Belize, and made our way back to Britain. He still does not know if his paranoia was justified. The FDA is continuing its investigation but will only inform him of the charge if he appears in person. He continues to move around Britain and won't disclose his address; he talks eventually of hiding out in Central America, directing his anger against the "system" which mitigates against his kind of therapy.

But as soon as you come up with something that does work, you are in an environment that is set up to deal with vast billion-dollar corporations with phalanxes of lawyers and researchers. Helminthic therapy could have been accommodated into the category of probiotic or supplement, like a live yogurt — it's the same principle. The organism is larger, but the numbers are way smaller. The pioneer of this potential therapy, Professor David Pritchard, at Nottingham University, is of course more circumspect about the possibilities.

After a terse exchange of emails with Lawrence a couple of years ago he cut off correspondence. Having conducted positive trials with Crohn's disease and hay fever, however, and with an NHS-funded study under way to look at MS, Pritchard has suggested he understood the motivations of Lawrence's unregulated efforts and the demand out there for the therapy. But he does not appear to approve of Lawrence's business, and did not respond to interview requests for this article.

He places his faith in the conventional means of identifying — and patenting — the molecular mechanisms that produce the response and has admitted he cannot envisage patients lining up at clinics to receive patches of parasites alongside vaccinations. Dr Rick Maizels at Edinburgh University is also at work on research into finding the "drugs from bugs" that will replicate the helminth effect, and other studies are ongoing across the world, in Brisbane, Denmark, Buenos Aires and elsewhere.

Maizels sees no harm in Lawrence's efforts to short-circuit that lengthy and slightly unfocused process — "There seems little risk," he says, "in that we know low levels of hookworm are relatively harmless, but neither is it an open-and-shut case that the parasites will work in every or any patient.

There may yet be adverse response. The fact is we do not know. Creating another drug, however, will not, to Jasper Lawrence's fertile mind, represent a solution. It is the live aspect of the therapy that he believes gives it its efficacy. If scientists really believe the hygiene hypothesis he argues, then what they need to be investigating is not the lucrative possibility of a patented formula, but the ways in which the public might be educated in the idea of co-evolution, our symbiotic relationship with our internal fellow travellers.

Lawrence is nothing if not an idealist. I considered religion for a while, but The Selfish Gene delivered. Once you realise we are vessels for our genes, then all sort of things follow. Well-baby checkups, if I succeed, will include deliberate infection with a variety of protozoa and bacteria and helminths starting at age two, because the effect of these things in a child seems profound…".