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Nanoparticles Stop Multiple Sclerosis In Mice
HangingChad writes "Scientists have used nanoparticles covered in proteins to trick the immune system to stop attacking myelin and halt the progression of multiple sclerosis in mice. The nanoparticles, about 200 times thinner than a human hair, are made from the same material as dissolving stitches. Scientists compare the process an immune system 'reboot'. The process keeps the immune system from treating myelin as an alien invader and to stop attacking it."
"We administered these particles to animals who have a disease very similar to relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis and stopped it in its tracks"
The article does not claim that this works for MS, just diseases similar to MS.
Good for you. Don't dwell on diseases you don't have.
Let me explain it a little bit:
Everything you know of the world comes through your nerves. Every way that you can interact through the world also runs through those same nerves.
Imagine being unable to trust that.
Your symptoms vary. Perhaps you can't tell if your foot is on the floor, or if you're urinating or not. Perhaps hot doesn't feel hot anymore, or cold feels hot also. Perhaps it's just pins and needles pains racing up your extremities at random and frequent times.
There are multiple types of MS. People don't have the same symptoms; it depends on where the lesions in your nervous system are. If they're on a part of the brain that controls motion, expect to be unable to do things that regular people can. You may be in a wheelchair or suddenly fall down a lot. If they're on a part of the brain that controls speech, expect to be unable to communicate, and to forget or misuse common words. If they're on a part of the brain that controls emotion, expect people to treat you like you're crazy when you break down crying in public.
Some people have the "progressive" MS that gets worse and worse until they are left in a special electric wheelchair, unable to do much more than manipulate a joystick to move and communicate.
Some die, especially those who get it later in life or are male.
For all, there is a sense of helplessness. The part of you that you think is you, the brain and the nerves that construct all you know of the world, is itself corrupt.
Expect helplessness, rage and perhaps hatred of any deities you once believed in.
Science has so far been unable to do anything about this disease.
The day they can will be a day of joy.
So far they've only done a Phase 1 trial which is to prove that it's not harmful, and the researchers called it "hideously expensive" at $1 million for 10 patients. If it shows clinical promise in Phase 2 and beyond, that price is likely to drop quite a bit and quite frankly the available MS treatments are also very expensive - if a single treatment is $100,000 but works for 5+ years, it may still be cheaper than what's currently available.
More information in an NBC News article: http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/18/15246299-new-approach-could-treat-ms-other-autoimmune-diseases?lite
And the original article (for those willing to cough up $32 for a single article or with a subscription to the Nature Biotechnology journal): http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.2434.html
fencepost
just a little off
What puzzles me(admittedly a layman) is that this procedure reduces rather than exacerbates the autoimmune response. If the organism has MS, the immune system is already getting jumpy about myelin, and then they inject something that(at first glance) sounds more like a myelin vaccine than anything else, but in this case the reaction to myelin is shut down.
Is it just a matter of being attacked by macrophages in the spleen, rather than elsewhere, or are there specific properties that the nanoparticles have to posses in order to be coded as harmless debris, rather than pathogens, during their destruction by macrophages(on a different note, I wonder if there are any viruses or bacteria capable of down-regulating immune responses to themselves by sending suitably modified cells into this spleen breakdown process? That would be sneaky...)?
I'm not a scientist, but would this have any use for other autoimmune disorders like type 1 diabetes, celiacs, and hell even organ and tissue transplants?
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Corresponding author Stephen Miller is the Judy Gugenheim Research Professor of Microbiology-Immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago in the US. He says in a statement:
It reads more like a transcript of a TV news segment. When you're watching TV they throw these titles at you before the person says anything to give them credibility, so you won't even notice that they never told you whether this guy actually had anything to do with the research. It doesn't work in print because people have the time to read it and realize she's not telling us key info.
The nanoparticles and Miller and colleagues used are made of a polymer called Poly(lactide-co-glycolide) (PLG), which...
The nanoparticles and Miller and colleagues? What? And why are random paragraphs in bold? As you scroll through the article there are four different paragraphs that are in bold for no apparent reason. Does she edit her work or just churn it out and post it?
Slashdot editors should start giving articles from Medical News Today more scrutiny. It seems like it's an office with about 5 people who pay this Catharine Paddock PhD to summarize articles in paywalled journals to drive advertising dollars. The other employees are two CEOs, a marketing director and a "Web Manager." Their other businesses are a database of hospitals, a medical abbreviation glossary, and a medical site ad service. Paddock's PhD is in "Business Administration." Summarizing the paywalled articles to raise awareness is fine, but she seems to be their only author and she can't get her facts straight. If she's contradicting herself in the first three paragraphs and we can't read the source material to verify, then reading MNT articles does nothing but drive ad dollars for MNT. Wait for some more reputable source to sum up the paywalled article and link to that instead.
...this treatment's ability to selectively target specific immune intolerances and isolated reset-response within host immune systems promises a way forward to enable immune system regulation for a host of autoimmunity diseases, such as: Coeliac disease, diabetes mellitus type 1 (IDDM), Sarcoidosis, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), Sjögren's syndrome, Churg-Strauss Syndrome, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, Graves' disease, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, Addison's Disease, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and allergies.
True, the particles used are an inert support for the proteins, not a treatment in themselves. The idea was to present the proteins as if they were cell-surface proteins which the immune system would recognize and build tolerance for. The original paper's authors performed earlier work with the same proteins attached to white blood cells. This was successful, but in terms of developing a clincal treatment, manufacturing engineered cells presents far more complexity, risk, stability issues, and cost than the manufacture of polymer microparticles coated with the protein. Microparticles, rather than nanoparticles, is the term consistently used throughout the paper, coincidentally. The particles are 500 nanometers in diameter, which is larger than what are usually considered nanoparticles 100 nm).
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."