Researchers from the University of Bristol and Britain announced that they have found a way to "switch off" autoimmune diseases and empower the immune system to protect the body against disease. The team is hopeful that these discoveries would help revolutionize the treatment of autoimmune conditions such as lupus and multiple sclerosis.
Ideally, the immune system protects the body against illnesses by attacking harmful bacteria, parasites, and viruses. However, when a person has an autoimmune disease, the protective immune system attacks the body's own tissues. Some of the most common autoimmune diseases include multiple sclerosis, Grave's disease or lupus, and Type 1 diabetes.
With this new study, the researchers were able to turn the autoimmune response off in animal subjects with multiple sclerosis. They exposed the subjects to the antigens, specifically gradually escalating doses of myelin, which is the protective sheath that coats nerve cells and is typically attacked by the immune system during the condition, resulting to the blockage of motor impulses from the brain. Motor impulses are important for movement control. They found that this technique not only quieted the immune system but also activated it's protective mechanism against the disease. This type of therapy is similar to allergy treatment where patients are injected with small amounts of the allergen that is causing the allergic reaction to desensitize the immune system and essentially train it to stop reacting to the irritant.
Bronwyn Burton who is part of the team that is working on the study said that, "We restore sort of a state of normality in these people. So, hopefully, they will still be able to respond to infection, they are able to fight off infections very readily, but they will not be able to mount these devastating autoimmune responses anymore." The results of the study have been published in the Nature Communications journal.
