Vaccine-Like Therapy Shows Potential for Treating Lupus

Researchers have devised a vaccine-like treatment that shows promise for treating lupus, a disease of the immune system that affects about 1.5 million people in the United States alone. The new treatment reduced disease symptoms and extended the lives of laboratory mice that researchers use to study lupus.

In the study, Dr. Philip S. Low and colleagues from Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN, USA) reported on the need for better treatments for lupus, an autoimmune disorder in which the body's immunologic defense system attacks healthy cells, damaging muscles, joints, kidneys, and other body parts. Current treatments for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) include high doses of steroids and other medications that have deleterious side effects.

The new approach targets abnormal immune cells in a manner that tags the aberrant cells for destruction by the body's immune system without affecting healthy cells. Called folate-hapten-targeted immunotherapy, the treatment greatly reduced damage to the kidneys and other tissues and also prolonged the lives of the mice by 10 months in comparison to untreated animals, according to the researchers.

"We suggest that this therapy warrants further evaluation as a possible approach for treatment of SLE in humans,” the authors wrote in their study, which was published in the September/October 2007 issue of the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics.


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