New hope for MS, other autoimmune diseases

By Maggie Fox, NBC News

Researchers trying to find a way to treat multiple sclerosis think theyve 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 its 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 doesnt work, its going to be another step down the road.

In autoimmune disease, the bodys immune cells mistakenly attack and destroy healthy tissue. In MS, its the fatty protective sheath around the nerves; in type-1 or juvenile diabetes its cells in the pancreas that make insulin; in rheumatoid arthritis its 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. Theyre attached to little bits of the protein that the immune cells are attacking, the researchers report in Sundays 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 macrophagesare carried to the spleen where they show these ground-up bits of cells to other immune cells called T-cells. Its a kind of introduction that familiarizes the T-cells with the bodys normal cells. Then T-cells know not to attack healthy cells.

Millers 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.

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New hope for MS, other autoimmune diseases