What is the inflammasome and why do I need to know about it?

The inflammasome is a multiprotein complex which, as the name suggests, is responsible for your bodies inflammatory response when you become injured or unwell. There is more than one type of inflammasome, but they all have one thing in common. They act in response to different danger signals inside the cell to tell the body it needs to act.

When it is doing its job correctly the inflammasome is a good thing for you. For example, it is part of your immune systems first line of defence against infection.

However, if you work in drug discovery you are likely to have already heard of the inflammasome because when these protein complexes are not working as they should, they are also now implicated in a wide range of diseases. Because of this the drug discovery community are now looking at inflammasome inhibitors for a range of indications from gout to Crohn’s disease to neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s. They have also been implicated in some of the severe inflammatory responses to COVID-19 infection.

How do I find out more?

There are some excellent videos and review articles emerging discussing the therapeutic potential of targeting the inflammasome.¹ However, if you are interested in finding out more about the role of the inflammasome in neurodegenerative diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis and Alzhiemer’s I suggest you also sign up for Dr Elise Malavasi’s 15-minute webinar Up-skill with Malvern Panalytical: why you need ex vivo inflammasome slice assay for neuroinflammation discovery, which is coming up in October 25, 2022. REGISTER HERE>>

Not only will you learn a bit more about the inflammasome itself, Dr Elise Malavasi will also describe the benefits of a slice assay which can be used to study the effects of potential future drugs on the inflammasome activation and subsequent downstream signalling.  

Further reading

• Innovative assays for neurodegeneration drug discovery programs – WATCH the webinar
• Specialist multiplex histology services – VIEW the poster
• Neuroscience – VISIT the webpage
• Drug discovery – VISIT the webpage

 _{¹ (a) Dhruv Chauhan, Lieselotte Vande Walle, Mohamed Lamkanfi, Immunological Reviews https://doi.org/10.1111/imr.12908 (b) Haitao Guo, Justin B. Callaway, and Jenny P.-Y. Ting, Nat Med. 2015 Jul; 21(7): 677–687. doi: 10.1038/nm.3893}