Researchers from Pritzker Molecular Engineering, under the guidance of Prof. Jeffrey Hubbell, demonstrated that their compound can eliminate the autoimmune response linked to multiple sclerosis. Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have developed
This article is garbage but I’m a molecular biologist and the publication they’re talking about is really neat.
The “ELI5 to the point of maybe reducing out the truth” way to explain it is that the researchers can add “flags” to proteins associated with immune responses that make cells pick them up and examine them. This is shown to work for allergins (so say, add a flag to peanut protein and the cells can look at it more closely, go “oh nvm this is fine” and stop freaking out about peanuts) as well as autoimmune diseases (where cells mistake other cells from the same body as potential threats).
It’s not nearly to a treatment stage, but tbh this is one of the more exciting approaches I’ve seen, and I do similar research and thus read a lot of papers like this.
There’s a lot of evidence that we are entering a biological “golden age” and we will discover a ton of amazing things very soon. It’s worrysome that we still have to deal with instability in other parts of life (climate change, wealth inequality, political polarization) that might slow down the process of turning these discoveries into actual treatments we can use to make lives better…
Still, don’t doubt everything you read! A lot of cool stuff is coming, the trick is getting it past the red tape
Wealth inequality won’t stop these discoveries making people’s lives better, it will just ensure that the 1% live forever in perfect health and the 99% get to watch their kids and grandkids get sicker as the environment, living standards and employment situation deteriorate, until automation gets to a point where the working class are no longer required and can be safely left to starve or killed off.
Americans invest milions in healh evolution and only 1% of the americans can use it. On the other hand every other country with a free heath care will provide the solution discovered by americans for free to their people. Americans dying to keep the world alive. This is really fucked up.
This is basically my fear, also. How can I retain hope that new, amazing treatments will help people if we don’t even have equitable access to the current treatments?
For example, we still make people seeking medicines for mental health try going through a gauntlet of dependency-forming drugs from greater than half a century ago (that have been shown to be effective in less than half of people who take them) before insurance will pony up for contemporary alternatives (that work much more often).
I don’t work in the clinical space so don’t trust me too much… but jeez we have so many things to solve before the “bio golden age” really helps normal people
“Red tape” eh? Shit if I had MS or AIDS I’d get some red contact lenses and some fake white fur, just don’t ask where the rat tail is attached, and be in for clinical trials in the AM. “I’m a rat it’s fine. I mean squeek squeek.”
That is so funny… tbh I know I’d get shit for this professionally, but it definitely frustrates me that we don’t allow people with few other choices to have access to crazy, left field treatment stuff.
My best friend died of a specific and rare cancer this year. We know exactly how that cancer works on a molecular level, and we’ve found a few chemicals that interfere with the function of those cells in vitro while not seeming to harm average cells.
Sure, it’s a huge risk to take that drug that’s only been tested in a dish, and it wouldn’t be worth it for most people. But he was going to (and did) die within a year of diagnosis. It’s not like he had other options.
Maybe he should have invested in a rat costume ;)
Every time I see articles like this I’m very happy for everyone having those horribly debilitating and deadly autoimmune diseases.
Then with some shame I hope it might maybe one day also cure my slightly debilitating non deadly simple allergies one day.
Yay it seems it might be good for both!
As someone with both Multiple Sclerosis and a whole bunch of environmental and food allergies, I hope we both get helped.
Well, you’ll also be happy to know that they started this work on allergin way before working on autoimmune disease, and in my opinion, the evidence that it works for allergies is much stronger than how it works for autoimmune diseases! Not necessarily because it won’t work for auto immune stuff… just that they have done less confirming.
I have severe allergenic asthma so I was excited about it too 😁
Ooh, thanks for the excellent information!
It’s so hard to come by nowadays.
The privacy on that site was horrible, and I stoped de-selecting vendors who want permission to track me after two minutes.
But I wanted to ask you: are there any biologics based on this discovery in phase I or even II at this point? Any odds on one of them making it to III?
(also re: your last comment, read William Gibson’s The Peripheral; you are describing his “jackpot” scenario)
Nope! This research is all done in rodents, to my knowledge. I’m always like “wow what a cool and maybe lifesaving discovery!.. for people in like a decade+!” 🙃
(thanks for the book rec!)
privacy on that site was horrible, and I stoped de-selecting vendors who want permission to track me after two minutes.
Just open the page in a private window at that point, and click the “yeah sure track everything bro” button.
“Private browsing” is for not letting your mom see your porno history on the family computer, it does fuck all for you being tracked online.
It deletes the cookies from Incognito, if you only open that site in incognito and then close the tab, it does nothing.
It still knows your IP and browser fingerprinting still works, they still know who you are and what sites you visit. If you change your VPN server you’re a little closer, and of course there’s Tor assuming you don’t get a malicious exit/entry node set, but private browsing isn’t as private as people seem to expect.
Fair enough.
It’s actually good in firefox and safari, just don’t use chrome
Maybe if people knew they’re going to be around for 200 years they’d think twice about these other issues because now it’s affecting them too and not just the next generation.
Thanks for the time saving summary
Hope it’s not a stupid question but would this kind of thing work for ankylosing spondylitis??
I ask because I suffer from AS the doctor’s that I’ve gone to are always arguing whether it’s an autoimmune or an autoinflammatory disease, and on the web it says that the underlying mechanism is either of the two as well.
So it’s not clear to me whether it’s one or the other, or if itimplies the same thing. I’ve read a huge deal about AS but I’m not really good at biology or medicine to understand a lot.
Honestly the only reason I’m commenting -and asking- here, is because I want to have hope that this actually leads up to something that can help me stop this fucking pain that makes me feel like I want to die (figuratively) but I’m afraid of this being a clickbait article.
Also my English is not the best so sorry for any mistakes and for the long comment.
Do you take humira or another medicine for it? I have AS too and it’s bearable with Humira for me. But yeah if this research leads to something that would be great
Oof I’ve had an experience with these meds…
I used to take Humira for 5 years but my country stopped delivering it (I used to live in Venezuela), then I moved ti the US and started Humira again, but it was about 30-50% effective only, I still had a lot of pain
I then went through Cosentyx and Taltz, none worked. Then I tried Enbrel, same effectiveness, got it through a foundation. Healthcare didn’t want to cover it and the foundation didn’t approve me if I had Healthcare.
Got sick in the US, lost all my money (due to lack of money), so I spent the little I had saved to return to my country, moved to Brazil and I’m about to start Golimumab (Simponi) tomorrow, hopefully it works because I haven’t gotten medication in 2 months and the pain feels unbearable.
Having said all this, if there is a speck of a chance that this helps people with AS and other similar conditions, it would make me happy. Having this kind of pain is unbearable.
Sorry for the long comment, I suddenly wanted to rant about this!
Wow. You’ve tried a lot more than me. I just met a nurse in the airport and she said to try this drug she administers, but I can’t remember the name now… she did send me a link to their website though. But honestly I’m a bit suspicious of stuff like this. https://www.soleohealth.com/chronic-inflammatory-disorder/
But I mean, if you’re desperate then maybe give them a call, idk. Kinda seemed too good to be true, the story she was spinning for me.
I’m sorry! My knowledge of this process does not extend to the point where I could even give you a hint of the answer. To be honest, it would require me diving into the underlying mechanisms of your condition, and it sound like your doctor has said it isn’t even settled science why it’s happening, so I don’t think anyone can tell you if this would work for you.
I know that isn’t what you wanted to hear, but two things: 1) this treatment is a long way off anyway, so anyone will have to wait for it to be available, and 2) there are probably many other treatments coming down the line for your condition… even if those also take a long time.
Anyway, I’m sorry for your pain and that I couldn’t help! Honestly, I hope something will be available to help you many years before this becomes a treatment option.
Thanks for your comment, I always have to read the comments first to see how legit the research is. You put it very succinctly, thanks.
That would also work for cancer then, wouldn’t it? Since the mutated cells hide from the immune system you can mark a few to get the immune system to take a look and realize that shit is happening, or am I oversimplifying too much?
There are immunotherapy treatments for cancer already. Infections and cancer use the immune system the correct way: “tag” the problem cell/virus part with an antibody, make a lot more antibody and flood your body with it to clear the problem cell/virus.
This is the process a vaccine uses. The old vaccine method is to take a bunch of dead bacteria or inactivated virus and put that in your body. Your body should identify it and begin making antibodies against it. If you do get exposed to the disease, your body is full of antibodies which can immediately clear it, rather than letting the infection/cancer work for a few days without much of an immune response.
An autoimmune disease, a body “tags” its own cells. Then the immune system invades the person’s own tissue.
I have celiac disease. If I eat gluten, the enzymes I use to digest gluten become tagged. Unfortunately, humans make one gluten enzyme (TG2) that’s found everywhere in the body. A third of celiacs will have their thyroid tissue affected if they consume gluten.
One particular antibody, IgE, is known for extreme reactions to antigens. These are the ones known for the immediate and life-threatening allergies (peanuts, shellfish, bees, wheat).
This new stuff appears to be a way to tag antibodies or antigens or memory T cells (they hold the “blueprints” to make antibodies really quickly after your natural antibodies go away) and have the immune system “re-evaluate” the antigen. I’m guessing from the post above and a little of the article. I haven’t heard of this process in the body before.
Cancer itself is not autoimmune (autoimmune inflammation can make it more likely to happen, but tumors don’t form directly through autoimmune mechanisms). So the first pathway used for normal vaccination is what’s needed. The difficulty lies in knowing something in each specific cancer that would make a good antibody target. It is a person’s own cells and DNA, so a lot of care has to be taken to find an appropriate antigen. Immunotherapy treatments that exist are really specific to certain types of cancer. They have much less severe side effects than radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
You’re not oversimplifying from my description, my description was just too simple itself! Unfortunately, no, it wouldn’t work like this. The whole idea is that the cell would pick up anything and discover that it isn’t as dangerous as it thought. That’s the opposite of what we’d want for cancer cells!
Luckily, there are many, many other treatments for various cancers coming in due time, also. My research is actually closer to cancer research than immunology, so I can tell ya-- there’s good stuff coming!
Seeing as this is useful for allergens, is this useful for atopy un general?
Maybe? But it works by flagging specific proteins related to allergenic response. For people with higher tendency to develop allergies in general, I imagine you’d need a LOT of different flagged proteins to cover the bases of what one’s immune system was already alerting to.
Tbh, it might be a good treatment for those individuals for their few, most problematic triggers, but I think in general there are probably better approaches for them!
getting it past the red tape
And into the grey matter of those damned antivaxxers. 🙄
At least this is about autoimmune diseases which aren’t contagious.
I’ve been following cures like this for years. There are three candidates in phase 2 trials right now that appear to work, they’re mostly figuring out the doses needed and there’s a big question on how long they last. Hopefully permanent but we don’t know for sure.
Diabetics have just been so beaten down by this whole thing. I was told the cure was 10 years away 40 years ago. Even if the technology described here works we could be another 15 years before we see it. Researchers said it could be here as soon as 5 years, which is true if unrealistically optimistic. I believe the cure is coming but I’m not holding my breath until I’m actually in front of a doctor about to receive the cure whatever it happens to be.
It’s a clash between scientists needing to be optimistic about their findings to maintain funding and real people needing it asap. We need to fund more medical research outside of for-profit corporations and increasingly expensive academia
Imagine if there was a global fund for disease cures that all the industrialized nations poured their money and resources into.
If you’re talking about The Global Fund, they only attack very specific diseases, mostly eradicated in industrialized nations but persist due to poverty (like malaria).
Which is silly because eradicating them in some places while leaving them elsewhere just costs more money long term.
I wonder to what degree anti-western sentiments impact the delivery of certain treatments. Thinking about the distrust I read about after a fake vaccination campaign was used to take out bin Laden, and other distrust and anti-messaging that has to be contended with. It sounds so impossibly frustrating to have the added burden against such basic medicine.
Wut?
I can just imagine the opportunities for corruption in such an organization.
I’m curious how we will ever be advance to the point of being a post-scarcity space faring civilization if we don’t take these sorts of steps because we’re too busy wondering about what might go wrong
I highly doubt we’ll get to a post-scarcity space faring civilization stage. More likely, we’re in the midst of the “self-destruction” part of the Great Filter.
Well if that’s the case I wish someone would tell me where the bombs will be landing so I can get it over quickly.
Imagine if the research and development of treatments and vaccines for endemic pathogens and genetic disorders were… you know… socialized
I hear this argument all the time, but the majority of the major research comes from the US [1]. My inclination is that, because the US is for-profit, the cures are developed faster and the science is here. The socialized nations lack, it’s a fact, and it’s certainly not for a lack of resources
It seems like the COViD model worked pretty well. One of these days I’d like to better understand the process, but I believe it was something like ….
Vaccine developed by private companies but with a lot of government funding but more importantly, massive contracts at a fixed price.
Outside of for-profit corporations and outside of academia? So neither the private sector nor the public sector? Who should do medical research then?
It’s like all the revolutionary battery technologies, computer storage technologies, fusion, cure for cancer, anything with graphene in it, cure for immune diseases and all that. People just love to write clickbait articles about this stuff.
Developing these ideas in the lab takes decades, and turning those ideas into actual products takes even more time. When you see articles about these topics, you can be pretty sure you’ll never hear about it again.
Edit: Just to be clear: technology is going forward all the time, but news articles tend to fucus on things that are interesting or fascianting, and extrapolate from there. The technologies that actually end up becoming widespread might not be interesting enough to write about.
The real reason it takes time is because we try not to harm people even in experimental drug testing. It would be much faster to simply toss shit at the wall and see what sticks, but that’s not exactly humane. So we have to find analogues that hopefully mimick humans will enough, but they don’t really work well. So it takes lots of time to build up enough evidence with those preliminary tests to convince the safety board to allow human trials. Then trials have to slowly scale up to limit the amount of people harmed by unforseen effects with a lot of time between as the safety board reviews the previous results before allowing the next test.
It’s all good to do, but it does make development frustratingly slow sometimes. Especially when people are actively dying waiting for the new drugs.
Looking at the price per kWh for commercial batteries tells me that we are seeing the battery revolution right now.
Graphene is already commercially used in some applications:
There are already very effective cures for some types of cancer (note that the differences between the many types of cancer can be huge and so the effort and time needed to create cures will also be very different. some treatments also are effective but not completely understood yet, like for bladder cancer)
Nuclear fusion devices are commercially used in material analysis (mostly in the semiconductor industry and in ore processing). There are different types in use – some even use thermonuclear fusion on a small scale.
It all seems like super crazy superconductor level tech until it becomes mundane and part of peoples lives … then we stop noticing how amazing it really is.
Oh, I’m not saying that development isn’t happening. I’m just saying that the articles you see on the magazines and papers tends to focus on wild technologies like grinding metals into nano particles and using that as a battery. Yes, New Scientis (or was it Scientific American… can’t remember) actually wrote about that stuff and predicted that cars of the future would use this energy source. Ideas like that get reported bacause they sound cool, while incremental upgrades to plain old lithium ion technology gets ignored by the tech magazines.
I’m really looking forward to seeing graphene and carbon nano tubes being used in various applications. Scaling up your production usually is the real problem though. Even if you’re able to produce a few micrograms of something in the lab doesn’t mean you can actually turn that into a commercial product. The transition from NiMH to Li-ion seemed like that for a while until one manufacgturer (was it Sony or Philips?) took the risk and started making those batteries in massive scale. Consumers loved that, and before long everyone started using this wonderful new technology. When someone takes that risk with graphene, we’ll probably start seeing it everywhere.
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mRNA vaccines had been in development for about 20 years prior to 2019. We were lucky.
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It’s difficult to pin down “when did mRNA research begin?” but, a pretty good date is to say, “The 1990s.” But you could go back as far as 1960 or 1970 if you were being technical.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/the-long-history-of-mrna-vaccines has a good write-up.
mRNA technology is a HUGE breakthrough. Like I said, we were lucky it was essentially ready and able to help with the COVID vaccine development when it was.
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Nope. In this case they figured out that you can “tag” molecules with N-acetylgalactosamine, and that convinces the Liver to tolerate the molecule that causes the immune reaction and signal the immune system. My wife has a major anaphylactic reaction to certain shrimp and this would be a game changer.
Graphene actually is used in small amounts in a few places today. The difficulty is still in scaling up production.
I won’t really know which computer storage technologies you’re referring to. There are plenty of different ones, most of them just have niche applications or are too expensive to replace today’s SSDs for general use, as SSD technology have gone a long way. It’s a similar story to batteries, honestly. Lithium is still just the cheapest for what it does, but alternatives for niche applications exist.
Fusion needs more funding, no way around that, otherwise the theory is sound.
But of course, it is true there’s tons of clickbait. But promising new developments do exist.
Before SSDs became widespread, the tech news would usually find a way to include an article about a revolutionary new storage technology that could store 100x more than a CD. Yes, that was a long time ago, and no, we didn’t hear from those technologies ever again.
100x more than a CD?
700 MB was the typical capacity of a CD. 100 times 700 MB is 70000 MB, ~70 GB.
Conventional (or “pre-BD-XL”) Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual-layer discs (50 GB) being the industry standard for feature-length video discs. Triple-layer discs (100 GB) and quadruple-layer discs (128 GB) are available for BD-XL re-writer drives. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray
SSDs nowadays can hold multiple TB of data, and HDDs can get even bigger in capacity 20 TB HDDs are available for consumers.
and no, we didn’t hear from those technologies ever again. source: you :D
I was mainly thinking of all the countless articles I saw in various magazines in the 90s and 00s. It was pretty wild what people were thinking what storage of the future would look like. Then DVDs and higher capacity HDDs came along. In the end, they actually ended up having the capacity that the articles were speaking of. It’s just that the technology wasn’t quite so creative.
Also, we didn’t really replace the floppy disk with one of those revolutionary technologies the articles were talking about. Floppies simply died out when CD-RW and DVD-RW became good enough. Eventually those died out too when flash drives became cheap enough. There was a long list of candidates that were supposed to occupy that same space, but they just never became anything. Eventually cloud storage took over and by that it was far to late for any of those dead technologies to even try.
I recall seeing one Nokia phone that actually did have a tiny HDD inside it before flash memory became cheap enough. That could be considered one of the wild technologies that were supposed to take over the market, but never did. Turns out, CF and SD cards were so much better, so they ended up becoming the new standard. Once again, all the wild articles in the tech magazines did’t predict flash memory to dominate the market, because that just wasn’t click bait enough for the editor. Instead, wild quantum crystals and crazy experimental stuff like that was in the headlines all the time. Maybe all the incremental developments in DVDs, HDDs and flash memory just wasn’t sexy enough to write about.
I was thinking of forwarding this to a friend with type 1 and remember the tale of misery from the last one I sent. Exactly what you said. She’s 38. Don’t get her hopes up.
Reversing type 1 is a complete lie. Unless you can somehow magically reatore pancreatic cells
You actually can, that’s the easy part surprisingly. The hard part is keeping the body from killing beta cells after you induce their growth which is why it’s not cured yet.
You actually can
Source please.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7454996/
Looks like you can in theory? I was interested and asking for a source is absolutely fair.
Seems possible but highly experimental https://www.ajmc.com/view/beta-cell-reactivation-may-be-viable-treatment-for-patients-with-type-1-diabetes
Look up Vertex. They have stem cell derived beta cells they’re looking to put in a pouch to avoid immune response, but AFAIK the production of the beta cells is a solved problem. They implanted those cells in someone and he’s seemingly cured.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/health/diabetes-cure-stem-cells.html
The issue is that cure currently comes with life long immunosuppressants.
A few people asked for more information about these trials that I referred to above. In theory if you can cure one autoimmune disease you should be able to use the same method to cure any of them. Obviously we don’t know that for certain and diseases like Diabetes has the extra step of inducing the growth of new beta cells to produce insulin (more on that below)
That said, the three trials I referred to are Celiac specific. I have this and T1D so those are the two I’ve been following most closely, but I definitely dive into news on ms or any of the other autoimmune diseases.
Note: all of these entered phase 2 this year. They are in the EARLY EARLY stages of that phase, so we should see results in 2025/26 for these. I am also ignoring any trial not in phase 2. Also note that several diabetes and ms cures are essentially variants of these, and many of them are running in parallel.
KAN-101: This is from Anokion and happens to have a trial in my area, hence it’s the one I know the most about. This one works by targetting the liver where the relevant immune cells are produced. Even in their phase 1 trial they found that patients had a dose dependent reduction in IL-1 (a cytokine that your body releases in the presence of gluten if you’re celiac). As with all these trials they need to determine what dose is needed to be a full cure and is it permanent?
TAK-101: This is an MS cure that was adapted for celiac disease, originally developed by ImmunisanT. They also have several other variants of this one, including T1D. Unfortunately their website seems to be down. Takeda is handling the clinical trials here and last I heard they’re waiting for the celiac results before pushing forward with the others, but they expect them to move quickly at that point. Here’s a video by one of the researchers behind this.
TPM502: I know the least about this one, it’s from Topas Therapeutics and they recently announced the start of phase 2 trials in Finland, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden. [more]
I should emphasize that there is no guarantee any of these treatments will work and everyone is tired of the latest “breathrough” that we never hear about again. Some of the trails above had to go back to the drawing board after hitting phase 2, TAK-101 is a newer generation of “Nexxvax” which if you google that you’ll find articles about its cancellation.
Then Diabetes has the problem of beta cells needing to be restored or replaced. That’s looking feasible either by transplanting adult cells, stimulating the growth of new ones using stem cells or a similar concept. One proposal hides the beta cells from your immune system entirely inside a scaffold. That last one is more of a new treatment than a cure, but it definitely beats what we have now.
The good news is that work IS being done in this area, progress is being made, and I know at least with KAN-101 they have demonstrated it showing results. The cure is coming. Even if most or all of these trails fails the fact that they’ve seen the results that they have is still really good news.
Again, it’s coming. It’s just not in a hurry.
Thanking you for the knowledge dump. Always appreciated.
Thank you for this. I have T1D and it seems like every other day I’m hearing about a new cure for diabetes and other autoimmune diseases. Good to know that this isn’t just more clickbait. Still not getting my hopes up yet but I’ll be interested to see where this goes.
If there was sufficient funding and enough people on it, we surely could have gotten so much further in so much less time.
Of course you can speed up such developments only up to a certain degree. But given the state of so many important research fields, we’ve surely not scooped out the whole potential.
What are the 3 candidates you mentioned?
I’ll come back in a few hours when I’m on my computer and give you the list. I’m sure others will be interested in it as well.
I asked for a bit more info as well before I saw this response. Thanks.
I posted more information above in this comment: https://lemm.ee/comment/3624282
TAK-101 is a celiac variant of a (currently paused) MS vaccine. I linked a video on that in my other post that may interest you. The video predates the decision to focus on just one disease. Basically the first iteration of their technology wasn’t effective, but based on the theory that if it works on one autoimmune disease it should work on all of them, they’ve switched their focus to celiac because it’s easier to test the efficacy. Just measure the amount of IL-2 during a gluten exposure. Also it’s cheaper to run one trial than the 5 they had before for various diseases.
The good news is progress is being made on this. But don’t expect it any time soon until you can actually book an appointment to get the procedure.
Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to respond with more info.
I wasn’t expecting much so no worries and not expecting anything soon. I’ve seen these things for a couple decades now. But this one is interesting. So again thank you.
I responded to my own comment above with more info, check it out here: https://lemm.ee/comment/3624282
What phase 2 specifically if you don’t mind sharing? They mention in this article starting with a phase 1 for celiac and then a phase 1 for MS.
I’ve also seen so many of these over a couple decades now. I have RA and MS and often times while hope can be important. As Red said, hope is a dangerous thing and can drive a man insane.
I also have really complicated relationship with hope. Mainly, I try not to hope as my body seems to be insanely problematic. I am disabled with multiple autoimmune diseases and genetic syndrome. While objectively I find the advancement in treatment interesting and amazing, I personally try not to hope. It is absolutely exhausting to get your hopes up only for the other shoe to drop.
Over the years you learn to pick and choose which ones to even read about.
My favorites are when actual new meds are introduced to patients and the majority of the article talks about how much money they expect it to make for the pharmaceutical company.
Our immune systems are both one of the most fascinating things about us and for those with autoimmune issues like myself, the most annoying. Always good to see articles like this and I’m glad this focused on the actual science.
I’d love to sign up for the trial if they ever test it for vitiligo. There are wayyy more serious autoimmune issues that can and should be tested first for those truly suffering. Mine is just “hey look at weird color boy”.
Immune systems are wild, and it’s also wild how they can go spectacularly wrong in different ways. Autoimmune diseases run in families, but not necessarily the same disease. My great-aunt has Crohn’s. My dad and big brother both have segmental vitiligo (dad, just on the back of his neck and a shoulder, my brother on one arm), but my immune system decided my thyroid was the enemy. Like. Not fair, body. 🤣
My wife has MS. And even though we are of course far from being at a point where the disease will be cured, articles like this give hope.
There are a lot of smart people who are dealing with the topic. Hopefully they can get something solid done soon!
MS, ALS, and Alzheimer’s are probably the diseases I hope they cure the most at some point. Those 3 are just so ruthless and so hard on everyone. Every time I see something like this I’m super excited but I also feel like I’ve been hearing stuff like this for decades now
I will click on this headline when the link is to Nature or Scientific American or the Mayo Clinic. Thank you very much.
The article has the link to the original paper published in Nature Biomedical engineering at the bottom.
Thanks!
Hm, well the full paper is behind a subscription wall but the abstract sounds much more modest:
Our findings show that pGal–antigen therapy invokes mechanisms of immune tolerance to resolve antigen-specific inflammatory T-cell responses and suggest that the therapy may be applicable across autoimmune diseases.
“May be applicable” —> “can completely reverse” ???
Well it wouldn’t grow my colon back but I’ll take what I can get!
This just got me and I needed a good laugh so thank you.
Going on my seventht day of COVID, getting worse, and my scumbag immune system has decided this isn’t nearly as interesting as the large intestine and everything south of it that it took a few years back.
C’mon, little help here?!
I got COVID before the vaccines came out and I was surprisingly unfased by it, I was iffy for a few days but besides not being able to taste or smell for about 6 months I was fine. My wife however had to be hospitalised and she’s healthier than I am so I feel like I got very lucky.
I hope you get through it quickly and start feeling better!
Thank you, I had it before and pulled through ok, I started feeling better after an epic nap today.
Must have been terrifying for you while your wife was ill.
A few months before anyone even heard of COVID a friend of ours who was a runner and what not was in the ICU with double pneumonia for a long time and they had no idea at all what it was. We all assume it was COVID now but no one said it was (it’s not like they could have tested her for it). Pretty wild.
Right?! Just a way to be able to live somewhat normally would be amazing!
I wonder if it’ll be an anti-autoimmunity for life, or if we’d have to get regular doses like with Remicade.
Not gonna lie, I’m gonna be salty for a long time if a shot can fix my Crohn’s, since about 6 years ago I got a permanent ostomy bag -_- can’t give me back my ass hole.
They’ve had some real breakthroughs growing organs in pigs so don’t lose hope, you might get both at the same time!
Every time I read or hear about ablations, I cant help having a thought about the phantom pain phenomenon. In your that that would be a real pain in the ass.
I have had the same operation and sometimes feel like I have to “go”. It’s really weird. Sorry if tmi.
Same. Lol.
Maybe pig colons are next up on the transplant list.
Man I don’t know if I want more surgery at this point, but solid poops would be interesting I guess.
I’m good. I’m in and out in minutes. Yes, I get less reading done, but I have way more time for other activities.
Edit: plus road trips are so much better, no more dealing with horrifyingly gross gas station bathrooms.
Unpopular opinion: Anyone who refused the COVID vaccine should be banned from getting this.
Honestly asking, why even bring this up? What does this have to do with the topic of the post?
All you do is start an argument and divert away from the topic that was supposed to be discussed.
Just spiteful. And ironic if you really want to claim to care about public health
Just spiteful.
Wanting to have two seperate conversations about two seperate vaccines is “spiteful”? Really?
And ironic if you really want to claim to care about public health
And I do care about public health, allot. For the record, I’m fully vaccinated.
Science isn’t a religion. It’s a process. Just because it’s called a vaccine doesn’t mean its safe. You can be anti-this-particular-vaccine without being anti-all-vaccines.
(Edit - I misremembered what was hinky. For posterity, I’m restructuring my comment and preserving the bad take struck out below.)
In the case of the covid vaccines, that process was intentionally minimized as to bring the vaccine to market faster.The vaccine did have benefits. It also had complications
that instead of being found out in trials were found out after release.It also had complications that instead of being found out in trials were found out after release.
Few of which were serious, and the ones that were serious weren’t any more common than the rare serious side effects of previous vaccines.
Just because it’s called a vaccine doesn’t mean its safe.
Well they were/are safe, so I don’t know what your point is.
There were side effects that were serious. The vaccines and boosters effected different age groups differently. Some age groups were more likely to develop serious side effects.
Covid effected different age groups differently. Some age groups were more likely to develop serious complications.
In the instances where the risk of serious side effect was more likely than the risk of serious complication, at least one of the boosters was more likely to be bad for the patient.
If it is more likely to cause harm, I can understand not wanting to take that version.
My point is it’s ok to refuse medicine based on medical evidence.
They did not skimp on the process with the Covid vaccines. Not with the big ones like Moderna or Pfizer, anyway. They accelerated the process, but they did not skip steps. They did steps in parallel.
Agreed. I misremembered what the issue was. It’s been a second.
The issue was balancing risk of serious side effect versus risk of serious complication.
By refusing COViD vaccine despite all evidence showing it safe and effective, you put others in danger. I agree on being spiteful: you endanger me and my family because you don’t trust science , then you don’t deserve the personal benefit of science treating your auto-immune disease
I didn’t refuse the vaccine. Get the fuck out of here.
E: And all evidence didn’t show it was safe. There were risks. In the case of the vaccine itself, iirc, the risks of serious side effect were less than the risk of serious complication from covid. The primary 2-stage vaccine is a good call.
I did refuse a particular booster because the available data on it showed for my demographic the risks outweighed the potential gains; it was more likely to harm me than help me.
And all evidence didn’t show it was safe. There were risks. In the case of the vaccine itself, iirc, the risks of serious side effect were less than the risk of serious complication from covid.
Just wondering how you justify saying garbage like that when people died, have serious heart conditions, taste problems, balancing issues, etc. from catching COVID?
I don’t understand your comment. To put it another way, vaccine was less bad than covid. Or Covid was worse than the vaccine. Do you still object with the simplified phrasing?
I believe the COVID vaccine trials were the largest ever done, or close. And most of the “complications” were simply the same issues of “long COVID” but scaled down significantly.
Anyway, if people were only against the COVID vaccine, then that’s better than more broad anti medical stances. And I think it would be stupid to deny someone medicine for almost any reason, least of all that.
It really is / was a difficult information landscape.
Forgive my ignorance on the subject. Instead of reading studies directly, I used the opinions of doctors quoting studies to inform my opinions. If memory serves, for the first booster, it was more likely that young men would develop serious complications from the vaccine booster than if they developed covid instead. I think they were heart complications.
So if a drug is shown to be more detrimental than helpful, why is it bad to refuse it, or ask for a different drug, or for more investigation?
I wish I didn’t have to encounter people like you. You give medical science a bad name, and anti vaxers confidence.
How do I give medical science a bad name? Do I speak for the field?
You don’t want to get a vaccine to help others + yourself, you shouldn’t be allowed to “believe in science” when it benefits you and only you.
You don’t want to get a vaccine to help others + yourself, you shouldn’t be allowed to “believe in science” when it benefits you and only you.
Such a non-sequitur answer. And for the record, I’m fully vaccinated.
Go somewhere else to talk about your favorite vaccine. Don’t DERAIL this conversation about a completely different vaccine.
Don’t DERAIL this conversation about a completely different vaccine.
I was replying to a question. Please follow the context thread, or go away.
Don’t DERAIL this conversation about a completely different vaccine.
I was replying to a question. Please follow the context thread, or go away.
Here’s what you said, context wise …
Unpopular opinion: Anyone who refused the COVID vaccine should be banned from getting this.
You weren’t responding to a question, you were just offering your own opinion, an opinion that was different from the topic and the context of the conversation being discussed, and hence my reply to you, calling you out for it.
You’re being intellectually dishonest.
Ya, I am allowed to post my opinion. I don’t think people who refuse a vaccine that can help save others should be allowed to receive a vaccine that benefits only them.
If you’re upset, you’re part of the problem. Not my fault. If you don’t want to see my comments, which I am free to post, block me.
In fact, don’t worry about it. I will block you, because your reply is insane. Literally complaining to me because I posted my opinion, and then calling me intellectually dishonest. Nutters.
Ya, I am allowed to post my opinion.
No one says you’re not. The only point I was making is you’re posting your opinion in the wrong place and you’re ‘muddying the waters’ of the conversation.
That point was said straightforward to you, but you chose to ignore it and try to move the goal posts onto something else.
If you’re upset, you’re part of the problem. Not my fault.
I’m not upset at all, I was just asking a question, why are you expressing an opinion that doesn’t match the conversation being had and that you know would be inflammatory and pollute the conversation.
You keep trying to warp the meaning of my initial critique of your initial opinion into something else to win an Internet argument.
You continue to be intellectually dishonest.
People are saying it causes 5g.
Can I get it, I want strong signal at all times.
6g comes out, carriers push everyone to get new 6g phones as the 5g networks get worked over. Bunch of vaxxers just walking around like “Nah, mine’s fine. Why spend hundreds on a new one? 🤷” AT&T and Samsung suddenly sponsoring research to undo vaccinations and turn the frogs hetero 🤣
You’re going to need a booster every year to continue getting good reception or more g’s
[Punny jokeness] Now that I think about it, isn’t there a limit to how many g’s a human body can handle? We’re all gonna have to train like fighter pilots or switch our cell network naming scheme 🤔
Not that i necessarily support this policy, but to the people who are acting all offended at the idea you might be cut off from future scientific advances because of you’re hurting the public good (“Consequences? For my actions?!”): You could just get the vaccine.
Just make it a combination shot. Then they can hit the red button… or not!
Unpopular? O.o
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People should be allowed full decision over the treatments they want to get, no matter how arbitrary, stupid, or contradictory. To suggest otherwise is a horrific dystopia
Bullshit. You don’t get a new kidney and get to keep on drinking.
No, he’s right. They SHOULD be allowed full decision over the treatments they want to get.
However, those decisions should not be free from the rules we as a society have put in place.
Us banning COVID vaccine deniers this treatment could be a good compromise. They freely get to decide, and they also suffer the consequences of that decision. Win/Win.
this is honestly why I thought vaccine cards to sit at restaurants, attend concerts… These are good ideas.
We do this in Australia for kindergarten, if your kids aren’t vaccinated you don’t get the childcare subsidy.
For reference, the subsidy can be the difference between paying $200 a week and $1200 a week.
Scary shit!
Nah it’s great, fuck antivaxxers
Right. I don’t care if COViD deniers chose not to get a vaccine. I care that they endanger people who want or need to be more careful. Let them make the choice, as long as the rest of us can choose not to be exposed to them
That would create a world you won’t want to live in when fully realized
So people with autoimmune deficiency can choose to just hide indoors or die, because selfish pond scum spend too much time on Facebook?
Nah, that’s the wrong way around. Meet the basic expectations of society or accept you will be excluded from it.
Literally me. I’ve been locked inside since 2020 because I had a double lung transplant and COVID will most likely cause my lungs to reject, and I die.
Assholes refusing to put a damn n95 mask on has pretty much thrown my life away. My transplanted lungs wont last forever. My final years are locked indoors because a fucking mask is political.
Do you mean liver? That’s the organ alcohol primarily harms. Kidneys are somewhat secondary.
Yeah, because kidneys are a rare and valuable thing what drinking would prevent from working
That makes zero sense for your petty ass sense of vengeance by denying people easily manufactured treatments because they turned down a vaccine you think they should have gotten.
That most of society thinks they should have gotten. That results in other people dying if they don’t get it.
GTFO of here acting like your right to a fist doesn’t end where my nose begins.
The State isn’t the society…
so·ci·e·ty
/səˈsīədē/
noun
the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.
Thank you for proving my point.
To be clear, societies exist regardless of the existence of states. The fact that states are trying to control societies and communities doesn’t make any state “The Society”… Society is people.
Yes, you do get to decide the treatments you want to get. Nobody is forcing any treatments on you. But just like freedom of speech, it doesn’t mean freedom from consequences of that speech. Too stupid and didn’t want to participate in saving your fellow human? Well, said fellow humans don’t want to participate in saving you either.
If that decision contributes to the spread of a pandemic, they can keep they cherished decisions behind bars in a quarantined prison.
Oh no, the dystopia of having to get a vaccine to prevent the spread of dangerous disease to your fellow human beings. The horror.
The dystopia of arbitrarily punishing people with inability to get things that would literally cure their diabetes because they refused a vaccine
Imagine having diabetes, but refusing to get vaccinated so you’d be eligible for a cure.
If there are plenty of vaccines to go around, sure.
It’s tough to see promising treatments and cures for Type 1. There have been huge inroads for treatment but a cure always seems just around the corner. Here’s to hope for all the Type 1’s and thank you for all the people looking to find that cure.
Lol, just around the corner is right. My doctor, waaaay back in the 90s, said a cure was 10-15 years away. I think it’s just language they use. Especially when they are talking to the extremely sick/depressed who just learned what they have.
It usually is that close, but that’s assuming unlimited funding… Imagine if anything else had the funding that COVID did.
I have MS, I’ll go wild once I hear it’s approved. Until then I’ll save my energy.
The research is interesting, but I don’t appreciate the bullshit clickbait headline.
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My psoriasis went away completely after getting rid of/managing my mast cell activation syndrome, which was in turn caused by compression of the bottom of my spine
Some food for thought
This honestly sounds like what I’ve been experiencing for months and my Dr can’t figure it out, the leading guess right now is long covid. I noticed on the Wikipedia page it even mentions long covid, are they similar? Does your lymph node randomly swell up?
Long covid is very similar to MCAS
Yeah lymph nodes in my head would randomly feel swollen
Can you elaborate?
About what part?
What happened in your spine, how did you detect it?
There seems to be some compression in or around the cauda equina, I found out by pure fluke. I noticed I got a lot worse with the MCAS after doing hip thrusts with weights and after anything else that bends the lower back. Decided to hold my lower back really rigidly straight for a few days and my health issues were practically gone, and have been since.
There seems to be a few case reports online of people with MCAS getting a full cure after spinal decompression surgery but I think they had tethered cord syndrome.
Not sure what the best long term solution will be, need to find out why those nerves get crushed when bending but scans thus far are inconclusive
Yeah, pretty please.
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I hope you get help soon!
I had large amount of psoriasis spots on my arms and legs and also developed arthritis and for me Humira helped immensely.
No more pain and spots.
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I just got slapped with an auto immune problem with my thyroid. It’s inflamed and will never go back to normal. So far I only have a fat neck and I’m stable but at any moment I might develop hypothyroidism because of this. I can’t wait for this to work.
Edit: having said that… the source of this post has been known for clickbait bullshit articles so maybe I shouldn’t hold my breath :(
The source of this post might be. But the study is solid as far as I can see. It was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering last week.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-023-01086-2
As phase I clinical trials are underway, we’ll see how far this can get. But sure, don’t expect too much, then you won’t be disappointed. Let’s hope it can really help people.
Thanks for that link. I trust nature.com quite a bit more
It seems like a decently written article… certainly more readable than the abstract of the scientific article.
Non-hodgkins lymphoma here. My immune system literally wants to kill me. I wonder if this could do a “full reset”.
Take hyperthyroidism seriously. Left untreated it will change your personality and those changes will be permanent even after you kill your thyroid.
So far my levels are okay and I’ll have to do half yearly checkups to catch it changing. But from what I’m seeing it’s mostly an incrrased risk, not a death sentence just yet
That’s good 😊. My ex wife had graves. She is a women and has always been heavy so Dr’s ignores the symptoms for nearly a decade.
Yeah that sucks. Really shows its a tug of war between doctors and patients, where patients get to deal with doctors that don’t care / have prejudices that cause misdiagnoses, while doctors have to deal with patients who think they know better than the doctor… I’m happy that for the moment I’m fine
Hypo here since just a couple years. I just take Eutirox daily and monitor my TSH levels each year. Other than that it’s been fine, no quality of life issues for me luckily yet
Great to hear!
I’m not even there yet, just have an inflamed thyroid, but really not much I can do about it
Finally i can stop shitting my pants
I get to find out if I have ulcerative colitis or Crohns in a few days. This gives me hope that even if I have one of them, I won’t have to take meds for the rest of my life, or worse, have parts of me removed.
They would be able to develop this for both diseases, it was discussed on the UC subreddit… but it’s still a whole ago.
My wife has UC, the meds aren’t so bad for her 🙂 you got this!
Best of luck to you. My wife has had ulcerative colitis for 8 years now.
I have UC, gone through some tough (shitty 😏) times, but now in remission for 2 years with Vedolizumab (Entyvio). Keep pushing for new meds if the current one doesn’t work properly!
There is a Crohn’s and colitis community on Lemmy, fyi. Not very active yet but I found the support and advice on the subreddit version great.
Yes but can we make a boatload of money off it?
Exactly. They are probably looking for a subscription model first.
