Using Inverse Vaccines to Treat Autoimmune Diseases

3 months ago

Our immune system does a great job at identifying pathogens so as to be able to keep us safe. The immune system has a great memory to identify these unwanted guests, this is why it is able to remember and identify viruses, bacteria and other pathogen but with this great power comes great risk. Once the immune system has identified something as a threat, it will remember it and keep attacking that thing whenever it enters the body and this is the same thing that can happens when it see part of our body as a threat like the pancreas leading to diabetes, and so does it do for every autoimmune disease.

How do we get our body away from the enemy list our immune system so it doesn't keep damaging them? This is one question that scientists are trying to solve and this time around, they are using something that is used to help the immune system remember invaders to forget them. We use vaccines to help our immune system remember invader either by introducing dead, alive but inactive, or proteins of the pathogen into the body thereby helping the immune system remember so when next the invader enters the body this time in whole form, the immune system has been built to remember and defend the body.

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Scientists are trying to help the immune system selectively forget, thereby saving our internal organs. Vaccines which were made to help the immune system remember is now bring worked on to help the immune system forget. For the body to be able to identify and attack disease causing pathogens and foreign bodies, it does this though specialized T cells and antibodies produced by B cells. In the light of remembering antigens that can cause disease, the body can start to pick protein in our body as foreign and thereby targeting them leading to autoimmune diseases like Multiple Sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes, and Celiac Disease.

It isn't like we didn't have ways to treat this in the past and we did so by giving immunosuppresive drugs to patients who suffer from these diseases so as to reduce immuno-activity in the body. While the autoimmune condition will reduce, the patient will be prone as they have low immune system. So while this option exists, it isn't advisable but scientists have been actively working a solution and they have been able to look at a possible solution which is "backwards/inverse vaccines".

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In 2019, scientists published a hypothesized in Nature Biomedical Engineering paper that the liver can be used to asked make the immune system leave certain proteins while targeting others. This will help theoretically because the live plays a big role in the decisions of immune system as it filers blood and breaks down toxins. It is said that if the liver can breakdown a molecule then immune response isn't really necessary by the immune system and it does this by relying on the T cells which will help the body see non-harmful molecules are non-harmful.

Since the liver filters dead molecules, and doesn't need the help of the immune system since the dead cells have the molecules Polymeric N-acetylgalactosamine (PGal), or Polymeric n-acetylglucosamine (pGlu) instead they are handled by the liver without any interference. Scientists injected Ovalbumin a protein from eggs into mice to give them an egg allergy. While doing this, they added the sugar tag pGal and pGul in some and didn't in some. The researcher also gave specific regulatory T-cells so they can track the immune response of the mice. After a week, they saw that the regulatory T-cells of the Tagged ovalbumin increased which means the immune system identified them as harmless because they were going to be handled by the liver.

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They were able to test with with a real disease, and used diabetes where P31 was injected into mice with and without the sugar molecule pGul and pGal. Also T cells were injected into the mouse so they can attack the protein. In mice that didn't have the sugar molecule, the blood sugar increased while for those with the sugar tag, the Blood Glucose level didn't increased even when there was a high number T cells present.

With this, we can say there are heads way but this is going to be completely different with humans because when it has to do with autoimmune diseases, we always suffer from the disease before being diagnosed so there are still studies on if the research will work as a prevention or cure to autoimmune disease.