Safely Destroying Blood Stem Cells to Enable Immune System Restoration

Destroying and recreating the immune system is a potentially very effective way to treat autoimmune conditions, as the basis of that condition lies in the broken configuration and memory of existing immune cells. The aging immune system has similar problems in its population and cell behaviors, problems that might be removed by replacing all immune cells wholesale. Present strategies to destroy the immune system require harsh chemotherapy, however, which makes it hard to justify on a cost-benefit basis for anything except the most harmful of conditions. Undergoing chemotherapy of this nature has a high mortality rate, and long-term harm to the survivors is on a par or worse than life-long smoking. Chemotherapy will be replaced in the years ahead, however. The research noted here is one step towards selective removal of all immune cells without harmful side-effects, a capability that will open the door to a range of ways to safely rejuvenate an age-damaged immune system and bring an end to autoimmunity: Blood stem cell transplantation, widely known as bone marrow transplantation, is a powerful technique that potentially can provide a lifelong cure for a variety of diseases. But the procedure is so toxic that it is currently used to treat only the most critical cases. Now, researchers have come up with a way of conducting the therapy that, in mice, dramatically lowers its toxicity. If the method eventually proves safe and effective for humans, it potentially could be u...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs