On Monday, I returned from the 6th International Congress on Autoimmunity held in Porto, Portugal. You can watch my presentation here.

The Congress on Autoimmunity is a biennial event. It features dozens of talks, 1,800 registered delegates, and takes place over the course of five days.

Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld and I are clearly close buddies. :)

The meeting has a decidedly international flavor. Participants hail from Germany, Italy, Russia, Italy, South Africa, even Mongolia. For many researchers and scientists in the field of immunology, this is an ideal forum to learn about and discuss advances in their field.

Participants include researchers presenting their work, physicians gaining continuing medical education credits, and vendors hawking seemingly sophisticated technology. Who knows — maybe that five-foot chamber with the three LCD screens and dozens of buttons was no more than a glorified alarm clock. I probably should have gotten a brochure.

As host cities go, you can’t do much better than Portugal’s second largest city, Porto. The weather was cool and, except for the skater punks outside my hotel room, the locals were lacking artifice. (One grizzled fellow told me in broken English that Porto was so named, because once upon a time the city’s fathers said, “Let us call it Porto, because it is on a port.” Now there’s something you can’t get in a guidebook.) And what better place to have a conference on immunology than a city dominated by winding streets and dead ends? More than once, I completed a taxi ride thinking I couldn’t tell if I had been taken to my destination using the world’s most clever series of shortcuts or was simply being ripped off.

Belinda Fenter, me, Meg Mangin, Tom Perez, and Dr. Greg Blaney

The meeting itself was held in a historic waterfront building with high pillars and a floor with curious metal tracks leading between one room and the next. Although as good scientists, we spent a lot of time hypothesizing about how the tracks might have been used in the past, no one we talked to could tell us why they were there.

In his speech during the opening ceremony, Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld, the President of the Congress, proved himself to be something of a jokester. Shoenfeld said he had a particular fondness for Porto, no small part of it due to the fact that his wife had won a beauty contest held in Porto in 1975. When he wasn’t showing pictures of previous years’ attendees ogling belly dancers or introducing the night’s band - the Anti-Phospholipids - he was telling the audience that the three winners of lifetime service awards each would receive prizes of one million dollars (not true!).

One of the award winners was Dr. Eric Gershwin who, in addition to his studies in the field of autoimmune disease, maintains an informal medical clinic for handicapped animals including tortoises, horses, and skunks among others. Dr. Shoenfeld related that Gershwin is a direct descendant of the famous composer George Gershwin. We learned that Shoenfeld’s son, who incidentally turned out to be the keyboardist for the Anti-Phospholipids, received a gift from Dr. Gershwin: an original copy of “Rhapsody in Blue” signed by the composer himself.

Tom, Meg, and Tom (Meg’s husband) enjoy rabbit and other specialties at a typical Portuguese restaurant.

Shoenfeld confessed it was the first time the son thought his father’s scientific connections were of actual value. Incidentally, the other half of the Anti-Phospholipids was a violinist who presented at the Congress.

On a more serious note, Dr. Shoenfeld also noted how more diseases - including, for example, depression - are now considered by some to be autoimmune in nature. Interestingly, the list of diseases thought to be autoimmune closely parallels those which the Marshall Protocol treats. Several talks even discussed cancer and autoimmune disease. I find it interesting that when it comes to the MP, some people have a hard time accepting the hypothesis that nearly every inflammatory condition can have the same basic pathogenesis. Yet as the “autoimmune community” continues to attribute more and more diseases to their same basic disease model few people raise an eyebrow.

I arrived with a contingent of others who work closely with Autoimmunity Research Foundation (ARF). ARF’s time in the limelight came early in the Conference, on Thursday afternoon. The session on vitamin D was two hours long and was chaired by Dr. Trevor Marshall. In addition to the four of us associated with ARF, we heard from four others including Dr. Howard Amital of Israel and Dr. Maurizio Cutolo of Italy, both prominent researchers in the field of vitamin D. The last speaker slated to speak, a researcher from Iran, actually failed to show, presumably because he didn’t want to share the stage with an Israeli researcher. This is not the first time this has happened, we were told.

As the chair, Dr. Marshall spoke first. Marshall’s talk had a decided focus on bacteria. He began by reminding the audience that bacterial cells outnumber human cells by a factor of 10 to 1. He went on to argue that the microbiota we harbor has evolved to decrease antimicrobial peptide expression by dysregulating the vitamin D receptor.

Liz Marshall, Dr. Joyce Waterhouse, me, and Dr. Trevor Marshall after a trolley ride around Lisbon

Dr. Greg Blaney is an MP physician. Dr. Blaney presented data, serum blood values mostly, from his own sizable cohort of MP patients. Using that data, he articulated a rationale for why 25-D is an inferior marker of inflammatory disease compared to 1,25-D. He showed how, among his cohort, measures of 25-D had a high level of variability and 1,25-D tended to be more consistent with disease status. One of his sickest patients, he reported, had a 1,25-D in excess of 100 pg/ml. Hopefully, his talk will challenge, in at least some small measure, doctors’ and researchers’ practice of testing only 25-D.

Later on, Captain Tom Perez, RPh, MPH spoke. He gave some details of the Marshall Protocol study including statistics on how many patients, by autoimmune diagnosis, experience improvement by time frame.

In my talk, I made a case for why autoimmune diseases such as Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis are much more likely to occur in women than in men, especially during the childbearing years. My contribution had value because I was able to show how one can use the alternate hypothesis for vitamin D to formulate viable hypotheses that logically explain other aspects of autoimmune disease. In the parlance of software engineers, the MP is extensible.

My Citizen Kane moment.

Some people are wary of public speaking. As you can surmise from the above video, I am not such a person. Also, I’ve been longing for the chance to connect with researchers and doctors in a larger forum. In any case, I could have spent much more time talking! I actually was so focused on covering all the main points in my talk that I didn’t even notice the Citizen Kane-like screen behind me.

This Congress marks an important, though certainly not the final, milestone in the increasing acceptance of the Marshall Protocol as a therapy for chronic disease. It was telling that speakers supporting the MP model ranged from a molecular biologist to physician to public health official.

As expected, the other speakers in the vitamin D session offered more traditional perspectives on vitamin D. Prior to my opportunity to speak, Dr. Amital showed data connecting a low level of 25-D to lupus severity. Dr. Cutolo offered a similar conclusion for rheumatoid arthritis.

I take issue with observers who conclude that a low level of 25-D is necessarily a cause of the disease process. They could have just as well identified the measure as a result of the disease state. As epidemiologists repeat ad nauseam, “Correlation does not equal causation.” (I’ve been told that it is a rare epidemiologist indeed who doesn’t have this phrase tattooed somewhere on his or her person.)

Paul and I enjoyed the grilled “steer” at the Conference dinner.

In listening to the speakers in the vitamin D session, I imagine that even the least attentive audience member must have felt a certain amount of dissonance, even whiplash. I was disappointed that the forum didn’t allow for a more spirited dialogue, one we desperately need to have.

Being the penultimate speaker allowed me to at least briefly address the disconnect. I concluded my speech with this impromptu observation: “When it comes to correlating disease incidence with low levels of vitamin D, it’s also incredibly important to consider the alternate hypothesis, which is that the low levels of vitamin D may not be causing the disease but may simply be a result of the disease process.”

After the session concluded, Dr. Cutolo introduced himself and we spoke for about 20 minutes. There’s a lot to like about Dr. Cutolo. He’s a jocular guy, but he’s also a serious scientist and was therefore willing to consider the alternate hypothesis. What seemed to intrigue him most was Dr. Blaney’s point that 1,25-D is a more reliable biomarker of autoimmune disease status than 25-D. Perhaps we can expect future studies of autoimmune disease from Dr. Cutolo to rely on this measure. We also talked about my hypothesis: how a muted immune response during pregnancy could lead women to feel greater well-being.

The Congress concluded with a final group dinner held in a winery overlooking the Douro River. Trevor outed himself as a port aficionado. During dinner, he turned down the waiter’s offers of wine and held up his port glass in order to signal how eager he was to drink the local beverage. Also, we finally got to hear genuine native Portuguese music. The band played a series of “old country” ballads including “Do the Hustle” and “I Will Survive.”

Dr. Blaney shaking his groove thing.

The truth is, I can’t say with certainty what effect our speeches and our side conversations had on our fellow attendees. I had the distinct impression that a substantial minority had come to the Conference to conclude business deals. The sparkling booths were evidence of that. Nevertheless, I think we did succeed in presenting the research and hypotheses that underlie the Marshall Protocol to many of the world’s leading researchers and physicians. Thanks to the Internet, the videos of our speeches have the potential to reach an even greater audience.