Can Bees Stop Disease?

Last week in PSIO 495K our class discussed how inflammation can affect arthritis. In the review article entitled, "Cytokines in the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis," one of the inflammatory cytokines that was discussed was Interleukin-17. IL-17 is a potent inflammatory cytokine which is secreted by T-helper 17(Th-17) cells. In the above mentioned article by McInnes et al, they concluded that these Th-17 cells are "the key effector-cell subset in inflammatory arthritis." This statement must be qualified with the fact that this inflammatory research was done in rodents and therefore cannot always be transposed to the human immune system. The review article was able to show however that inhibition and stimulation of Th17 had a much greater impact on collagen induced arthritis when compared to the other inflammatory Th1 classes of T cells. Specifically Th17 stimulates chondrocyte mediated matrix degradation in cartilage, increases RANKL mediated osteoclastogenesis, increases the invasion rate of synovial fibroblasts and finally it increases inflammatory cytokine production. At the end of this review article it stated that treatment of rheumatoid arthritis is limited to TNF-alpha antibody therapy.

A more recent research article¹ shows that a resinous substance collected by bees can have immunomodulatory effects. Their research group showed that this resin called propolis can reduce the disease severity of collagen-induced arthritis in rats. The disease amelioration mechanism is due to the effect propolis has on the production of interleukin-17. This research group found that not only does propolis inhibit the secretion of IL-17, the resin also inhibits the differentiation of inflammatory Th17 altogether. Surprisingly this article did not elaborate about the proposed clinical benefits of using propolis as a treatment for RA.

A separate article written by Lupperts et al² demonstrated how their anti-IL-17 antibody could in fact be used therapeutically to reduce the severity of arthritis. They were eager to point out that their anti-IL-17 therapy positively affects both early and late stage arthritis. Experimentally this was shown in mice models which upon exposure to anti IL-17 antibodies had less proteoglycan depletion, less synovial inflammation, less cartilage erosion, less bone erosion and less chondrocyte death.

Perhaps in the future the natural propolis remedy will be able to be used therapeutically. This could be a region of research where physicians, scientific researchers and natural health fields could all work together. This is because these studies have shown that propolis and other suppressers of IL-17 and Th-17 have beneficial effects on arthritis. It would be interesting to see the effectiveness of this remedy in humans as opposed to rats and whether this immune system suppressor might have other systemic impacts. The effectiveness of this therapeutic resin would depend on whether these systemic impacts were mostly positive or negative.

1. Suppression of interleukin 17 production by Brazilian propolis in mice with collagen-induced arthritis. Tanaka et al.


2. Treatment With a Neutralizing Anti-Murine Interleukin-17 Antibody After the Onset of Collagen-Induced Arthritis Reduces Joint Inflammation, Cartilage Destruction, and Bone Erosion. Lubberts et al.