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The Holy Grail of treating autoimmune diseases has been suppressing an immune attack on a target organ without compromising systemic immunity. An international research team reports having achieved such antigen-specific immunotherapy in mice.
The team used mouse models of three autoimmune diseases: type 1 diabetes, experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE; a model for multiple sclerosis), and arthritis. Each mouse model was treated by creating “nanomedicines” — tiny particles coated by a disease-relevant peptide bound to MHC class II proteins — that caused the generation of regulatory T cells that suppressed both autoantibody and cytotoxic T-cell attack on a specific target. The specific nanomedicine used to treat mice in each disease …