As there is no cure for celiac disease, people must stick to a gluten free diet to remain symptom-free. While this has become easier in recent years, scientists have found some promising results in mice for disabling the disease. [via ScienceAlert]
Since celiac is an auto-immune disorder, finding ways to alter the immune response to gluten is one area of investigation to alleviate the symptoms of the disease. Using a so-called “inverse vaccine,” researchers “engineered regulatory T cells (eTregs) modified to orthotopically express T cell receptors specific to gluten peptides could quiet gluten-reactive effector T cells.”
The reason these are called “inverse vaccines” is that, unlike a traditional vaccine that turns up the immune response to a given stimuli, this does the opposite. When the scientists tried the technique with transgenic mice, the mice exhibited resistance to the typical effects of the target gluten antigen and a related type on the digestive system. As with much research, there is still a lot of work to do, including testing resistance to other types of gluten and whether there are still long-term deleterious effects on true celiac digestive systems as the transgenic mice only had HLA-DQ2.5 reactivity.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, we covered “inverse vaccines” in more detail previously.
Now they need to start looking at crohns/colitis T-cells, would be good to see some movement on that (pun definitely intended!!)
That seems to be a non-starter as per Crohn’s disease from Wikipedia: “Although Crohn’s is an immune-related disease, it does not seem to be an autoimmune disease (the immune system is not triggered by the body itself).”
A better approach may be a gene therapy since it seems to have a high correlation to certain gene variants.
I wonder if one could “unvaccinate” a body enough to permanently stop it from rejecting a donor organ. Fun term by the way, definitely not gonna cause a stink
Thank goodness vaccine critics are well known for being rational and skilled with nuance, and are in the habit of reading studies thoroughly and not just going off buzzwords or gross oversimplifications!
According to UNIDO people who refuse vaccination read on aveage 10-15 books a year while normal vaccinated people often don’t read any book because they watch TikTok.
The mixture of anti-intellectualism, emotional reasoning, the Dunning–Kruger effect, and a plethora of misinformation is generally how you get seemingly intelligent people to reject scientifically sound treatments.
It’s more complex than that I’m afraid
Scientifically sound as “safe and effective” when no long term health effects were known, they vaccinated the control group, and didn’t even bother to study whether it would prevent transmission or not?
Even the government now says the recommendations that children should get the vaccine were not based on any data but only based on “it would be better to have one recommendation for everyone” because it would be “less confusing”
I’m sure lobotomies were a “scientifically sound” treatment a hundred years ago btw.
I’m afraid that people who still talk like the one above you have crashed out like five years ago and refused to face the reality of what they’ve done to their own reputation and credibility, that they have set aflame their political chances for a generation or even longer… If they can’t see it now, they will always refuse to see it, and cover it up with platitudes and cliches they copied from Reddit… It’s kinder to just let them be, no sense in torturing each other if there’s no longer any hope for understanding.
Check the work by the group of Jeffrey Hubbell. They are also working on “reverse vaccination”, although not specifically for donor organ, they target autoimmune diseases which is close.
https://pme-cms.uat.uchicago.edu/group/hubbell-lab
That would definitely be nice, those dang things are incredibly frustrating and persistent
An interesting idea since rare cases have shown that it’s possible to merge two immune systems. However, I suspect that will be a lot more involved than convincing the immune system that gluten proteins aren’t a threat.
Yeah, doing one gluten molecular marker is a good first step. Doing all the markers on an entire organ would be step no. 48,823,939,294 (we’re going to need to rent some mainframe time to run some simulations…)
Didn’t this kick off a whole game series & movie franchise?