Confirming Age-Associated B Cells as an Important Cause of Autoimmunity

Most of the better known and more common forms of autoimmune disease are not all that age-related, though incidence for many of them ticks upwards with age as the immune system becomes ever more dysfunctional in later life. There are many more autoimmunities that are age-related, however, mostly comparatively poorly understood, and new ones are discovered on a fairly regular basis. It is fair to say that autoimmunity as a whole is poorly understood, however. The immune system is enormously complex, and it remains to be established as to how exactly it falls into the malfunctioning states that cause it to attack specific tissues, cells, and proteins that it should normally leave alone. It is unlikely that there is any one root cause, but the hope in the research community is that the broad range of quite different autoimmunities do in fact have commonalities, as is the case for cancer. Just as in cancer research, meaningful progress in the medical control of autoimmunity will likely hinge on identification and targeting of mechanisms shared by many or a majority of the diseases in this category. One of the most promising approaches to autoimmunity is to bypass the investigation of its mechanisms and just destroy the entire population of adult immune cells. The state-related data of the immune system, such as its memory, and including the errors that cause it to attack tissues rather than pathogens, is stored entirely in those cells. Wiping it clean and starting over has...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs