"Inverse vaccine" shows the potential to treat autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis.

https://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/fine-tuning-immunity


A new type of vaccine developed by researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) has shown in the lab that it can completely reverse autoimmune diseases—all without shutting down the rest of the immune system.

A typical vaccine teaches the human immune system to recognize a virus or bacteria as an enemy that should be attacked. The new “inverse vaccine” does just the opposite: it removes the immune system’s memory of one particular molecule. While such immune memory erasure would be unwanted for infectious diseases, it can stop autoimmune reactions like those seen in multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis, in which the immune system attacks a person’s healthy tissues.

The inverse vaccine, described in Nature Biomedical Engineering in September, takes advantage of a natural process in which the liver marks molecules from broken-down cells with “do not attack” flags to prevent autoimmune reactions to those cells as they die by natural processes. PME researchers coupled an antigen—a molecule being attacked by the immune system—with a molecule resembling a fragment of an aged cell that the liver would recognize as friend rather than foe.

“In the past, we showed that we could use this approach to prevent autoimmunity,” says Jeffrey Hubbell, the Eugene Bell Professor in Tissue Engineering and lead author of the paper. “But what is so exciting about this work is that we have shown that we can treat diseases like multiple sclerosis after there is already ongoing inflammation, which is more useful in a real-world context.”

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