Hope for the Treatment of Autoimmune Diseases: The Potential of Reverse Vaccines

I considered dedicating this space to the presentation of the supposed “alien mummies of Nasca” in Mexico, but there is nothing new about it. Except that to the usual questions (why do they continue to present themselves to politicians and not to scientists? and why is there no published study?) we add: how did they leave Peru?

For this reason, I preferred to write about research that, although it is in its initial stages, is emerging as hope for the treatment of autoimmune diseases. It is a study carried out by researchers from the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago (USA), recently published in the journal “Nature Biomedical Engineering”.

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Reverse vaccine

If there is one thing we learned during the pandemic, it was how vaccines work. These teach an organism’s immune system to identify external aggressors (viruses or bacteria) and know how to defend itself against them. On the other hand, when is an autoimmune disease detected? When the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy cells in your organs and tissues.

So what these American researchers have done is develop a “reverse vaccine.” And they call it that because it does exactly the opposite of what is expected of a conventional vaccine: it eliminates the immune system’s memory of a molecule.

Of course, if it were an infectious disease, eliminating the body’s immune memory would be fatal. But in the case of autoimmune diseases – such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, etc. – their progression would be stopped. As you can imagine, on paper this reasoning sounds quite logical, but the key here is to demonstrate that it is possible and that positive results can be obtained. And that’s where science comes in.

The role of the liver

The liver plays an important role in all of this. This organ is responsible for putting flags with the message “do not attack” the decomposed molecules. Those little flags are N-acetylgalactosamine (pGal), a monosaccharide or simple sugar. It does so because they are cells that must die and be discarded by natural processes. If the body itself attacks them, autoimmune reactions would occur.

What the researchers did was place an antigen (a molecule attacked by the immune system) together with a molecule similar to a fragment of an aged cell labeled with pGal. As a result, they showed that this type of vaccine can stop the autoimmune reaction associated with a disease similar to multiple sclerosis.

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But for all this to work, the role of T cells is important. In the immune system, they have the important job of recognizing unwanted or foreign cells and molecules (from viruses and bacteria to cancers) and getting rid of them. If a T cell attacks an antigen, that information is remembered forever. But these cells can also go wrong, which leads to the appearance of autoimmune diseases.

According to Jeffrey Hubbell, lead author of the study, in a statement released by the University of Chicago, what they are looking for is that any molecule can bind to a pGal to teach the immune system to tolerate it and that the reverse vaccine reduces immunity very much. specific.

The good thing is that, in this study focused on multiple sclerosis, they were successful. The immune system stopped attacking the body and the nerves functioned correctly again. The not so good thing is that they are tests that have only been done in animal models and there is still a lot of research needed to know if they will work in the same way in humans.

There are many loose ends, but also many trials in progress. The important thing here is to recognize how science done well is more likely to find solutions to problems that seemed impossible. Let’s not stop trusting and always betting on science.

2023-09-18 14:16:00
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