Researchers have developed an “inverse vaccine” that reverses the damage caused by autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.
- It could pave the way to a treatment for these diseases that doesn’t require suppressing the entire immune system.
Key points
- In autoimmune diseases, the immune system becomes the enemy. 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.
- It’s the job of the immune system’s T cells to recognize specific foreign antigens on the surfaces of unwanted cells and launch an attack against them.
- In the case of autoimmune diseases, the T cells become self-reactive, mistakenly considering healthy organs and tissues to be foreign organisms.
- Normally, a vaccine teaches the body’s immune system to recognize a viral or bacterial invader as an enemy that needs to be destroyed.
- But an “inverse vaccine” that does the opposite. It removes the immune system’s memory of one molecule, which, when fighting pathogens, would be undesirable but, in the context of autoimmune diseases, may prove to be a cure.
- The inverse vaccine takes advantage of how the liver naturally marks molecules from broken-down cells with “do not attack” flags to prevent autoimmune reactions to cells that die by natural processes.
