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Sometimes you can solve a mystery with a fish but not a mouse. Sometimes you can see a biochemical process happening, but you can't study it in detail until you identify the underlying players. Sometimes separate streams of inquiry turn out to be part of the same story.

All three of these were the case for a team of scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). Their new study, published Oct. 7 in Nature, solves a decades-old scientific puzzle and reveals that a critical inflammatory signaling pathway doesn't just summon immune cells to the place where they're needed—it also protects healthy cells from being damaged by the immune response.

The findings open new avenues for understanding diseases where inflammation runs amok, including cancer, inflammatory bowel disease and asthma.

The story begins in 1992, when scientists at McGill University were studying a fatty signaling molecule that summons immune cells to the site of an infection. The name of this important molecule is a bit of a mouthful: 5-oxoETE, which is short for 5-oxo-6,8,11,14-eicosatetraenoic acid.

The scientists could see that an enzyme—a biological helper that speeds up chemical reactions—was assembling 5-oxoETE and breaking it back down again. But they didn't know which human gene carried the blueprint for making the enzyme.

Without being able to identify the gene—and therefore to manipulate it in the lab—they were limited in their ability to study the enzyme further, to investigate its role in disease and to understand what happens when it malfunctions.

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