A drug that stimulates the immune system shows good results in patients with Crohn's disease.
In Crohn's disease, inflammation of the digestive tract leads to pain, diarrhea, and infection. The condition is a serious one, which often requires surgery.

Medical treatment involves using drugs that damp down the immune system, and so reduce inflammation. It may seem strange that the opposite approach - stimulating immunity - could also work. But doctors at Washington University School of Medicine now show that it does.

They treated a small group of patients with Crohn's disease with a drug called granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor (G-M CSF) which is known to stimulate immunity. Previously the drug had been used on patients with rare genetic diseases who also had Crohn's. To the doctors' surprise, the symptoms of Crohn's had improved dramatically in these groups.

In the current trial, patients received G-M CSF by injection for eight weeks, during which time 80 per cent improved significantly, with over half being in clinical remission. Once treatment was stopped, however, symptoms returned. Resumption of treatment restores the improvement. What is needed now is a bigger trial to see if G-M CSF can be used more widely.