Close the calcium channel to get rid of allergy?

Hopefully the auto-loader at the bottom will pick some previous posts here about calcium, vitamin D and allergy; these may be necessary for the background of a new study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine last week

We looked for Cav1 channel expression in Th2 and Th1-cells by real-time PCR and Western blotting. We sequenced the isoforms expressed by Th2-cells and tested whether Cav1 antisense oligodeoxynucleotides (Cav1AS) affected Ca2+ signaling and cytokine production […] mouse Th2 but not Th1-cells expressed Cav1.2 and Cav1.3 channels. Th2-cells transfected with Cav1AS had impaired Ca2+ signaling and cytokine production, and lost their ability to induce airway inflammation upon adoptive transfer.

This highlights again the close connection of the calcium system to immunology. While the earlier TRPM4 story was basically about mast cells, we now arrived at Th2 cells, yea, yea.

Addendum 29 April 2015

It took some time. Science has a paper on Calcium-sensing receptor antagonists abrogate airway hyperresponsiveness and inflammation in allergic asthma” by Yarova et al. writing about antagonists of the calcium-sensing receptor

We show that polycations and elevated extracellular calcium activate the human recombinant and native calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR), leading to intracellular calcium mobilization … These effects can be prevented by CaSR antagonists, termed calcilytics. Moreover, asthmatic patients and allergen- sensitized mice expressed more CaSR in ASMs than did their healthy counterparts … Thus, calcilytics may represent effective asthma therapeutics.

I don’t know, if the last statement is really warranted but – as written 5 years ago – there is a super tight connection of calcium and vitamin D to allergy.