‘Inverse vaccine’ could help tame autoimmune diseases

Vaccines rile up the immune system against pathogen invaders. But in autoimmune diseases, the immune system becomes the enemy. Scientists have now figured out a way to tamp down this self-destructive response in mice by attaching sugars to molecules that provoke immune cells. This “inverse vaccine,” reported this month in Nature Biomedical Engineering , could potentially lead to new ways to combat autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and lupus. “It’s a strong piece of work,” says Lawrence Steinman, a neuroimmunologist at Stanford Medicine who wasn’t connected to the study. The work, he says, offers “a cool new way” to potentially defuse self-destructive immune attacks. But Steinman and others caution that many other promising methods for taming the immune system in autoimmune diseases have faltered. The immune system responds to molecules—or pieces of them—known as antigens. Most of the time they come from dangerous invaders like viruses and bacteria. But some immune cells react to self-antigens, molecules from our own cells. And in autoimmune diseases, these misguided immune cells turn against patients’ own tissues. For more than 50 years, researchers have been trying to stop this internal war by restoring the body’s tolerance for its own antigens. They succeeded in experimental animals. In mice with an MS-like condition called experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), for instance, the immun...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research