New approach could treat MS, other autoimmune diseases

For all of us who have friends or family members with an autoimmune disease this article will Give cause for great Hope. Please read on…!!

By Maggie Fox, NBC News

Researchers trying to find a way to treat multiple sclerosis think they’ve come up with an approach that could not only help patients with MS, but those with a range of so-called autoimmune diseases, from type-1 diabetes to psoriasis, and perhaps even food allergies.

So far it’s only worked in mice, but it has worked especially well. And while mice are different from humans in many ways, their immune systems are quite similar.

“If this works, it is going to be absolutely fantastic,” said Bill Heetderks, who directs outside research at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, part of the National Institutes of Health, which helped pay for the research. “Even if it doesn’t work, it’s going to be another step down the road.”

In autoimmune disease, the body’s immune cells mistakenly attack and destroy healthy tissue. In MS, it’s the fatty protective sheath around the nerves; in type-1 or juvenile diabetes it’s cells in the pancreas that make insulin; in rheumatoid arthritis it’s tissue in the joint.

Currently, the main treatment is to suppress the immune system, an approach that can leave patients vulnerable to infections and cancer. The new treatment re-educates the immune cells so they stop the attacks.

The approach uses tiny little balls called nanoparticles made of the same material used to make surgical sutures that dissolve harmlessly in the body. They’re attached to little bits of the protein that the immune cells are attacking, the researchers report in Sunday’s issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Stephen Miller of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago had been trying a slightly different approach to treating MS. When normal cells die naturally through a self-destruction process called apoptosis, immune cells called macrophages come in and eat up the mess.

The macrophages are carried to the spleen where they show these ground-up bits of cells to other immune cells called T-cells. It’s a kind of introduction that familiarizes the T-cells with the body’s normal cells. Then T-cells know not to attack healthy cells.

Miller’s team had been trying to find ways to use this process to re-educate the T-cells. They have been attaching bits of the myelin that T-cells mistakenly attack to healthy cells from MS patients that were self-destructing, then infusing the concoction back into MS patients.

The idea would be to “introduce” the myelin to the T-cells at the same time they were “meeting” the healthy tissue, and educate them to leave the myelin alone.

So far the team has only shown the process is safe – a phase 1 clinical trial. But Miller says the experiment also seemed to show they were beginning to repair the patients’ immune systems.

However, it was hideously expensive. “It cost probably about a million dollars to treat 10 patients using live cells,” he said.

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