Ever since my master course on advanced immunology by Nicole Harris at EPFL I had an impression that platelets have been playing an important role in the immune response but were still a completely under-explored domain. This impression where confirmed when I was working with Cedric Merlot on building a predictive systems biology method for predicting systemic drug effect based on multiple protein interaction. In fact, as a side-result our method suggested a strong linkage between platelets and serotonin and also pointed that it might be heavily with the rest of the immune response system.

While reading a paper on a completely unrelated subject I fall on a syndrome that looks like single-protein caused, but that links eczema and low platelet count. Now, that gets really interesting.

Wiskott–Aldrich syndrome (WAS) is a rare X-linked recessive disease characterized by eczema, thrombocytopenia (low plateletcount), immune deficiency, and bloody diarrhea (secondary to the thrombocytopenia)