A TEAM of Oxford academics think they may have found a new type of treatment for heart disease - tick saliva.
The Oxford University research, funded by the British Heart Foundation, identified a protein within tick saliva which can bind and neutralise several chemicals released before - Myocarditis, which can cause sudden cardiac death.
Researchers have developed a ‘bug to drug’ formula where hundreds of tick saliva proteins are made into yeast cells, in order to identify the tick saliva proteins that have anti-inflammatory properties.
Newly published in the journal Scientific Reports, the research has identified several new tick proteins and shown that one of them, P991_AMBCA, from the cayenne tick found in the Americas, can bind to and block the effect of ‘chemokines’ which cause inflammation in myocarditis, heart attack as well as stroke.
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