Scientists are trying a revolutionary new approach to treat rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus and other devastating autoimmune diseases — by reprogramming patients’ out-of-whack immune systems.
When your body’s immune cells attack you instead of protecting you, today’s treatments tamp down the friendly fire but they don’t fix what’s causing it. Patients face a lifetime of pricey pills, shots or infusions with some serious side effects — and too often the drugs aren’t enough to keep their disease in check.
“We’re entering a new era,” said Dr. Maximilian Konig, a rheumatologist at Johns Hopkins University who’s studying some of the possible new treatments. They offer “the chance to control disease in a way we’ve never seen before.”
How? Researchers are altering dysfunctional immune systems, not just suppressing them, in a variety of ways that aim to be more potent and more precise than current therapies.
That anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis tends to strike younger women and, one of the bizarre factors, it’s sometimes triggered by an ovarian “dermoid” cyst.
How? That type of cyst has similarities to some brain tissue, Horng explained. The immune system can develop antibodies recognizing certain proteins from the growth. If those antibodies get into the brain, they can mistakenly target NMDA receptors on healthy brain cells, sparking personality and behavior changes that can include hallucinations.
Different antibodies create different problems depending if they mostly hit memory and mood areas in the brain, or sensory and movement regions.
Altogether, “facets of personhood seem to be impaired,” Horng said.
Therapies include filtering harmful antibodies out of patients’ blood, infusing healthy ones, and high-dose steroids to calm inflammation.
Those cyst-related antibodies stealthily attacked Kiara Alexander in Charlotte, North Carolina, who’d never heard of the brain illness. She’d brushed off some oddities — a little forgetfulness, zoning out a few minutes — until she found herself in an ambulance because of a seizure.
