Williams, 2023
Of the 8.1 billion people in the world, 1 in 10 have an autoimmune disorder. There are 8.1 billion people in the world, and 810 million of these people, or 1 in 10, have an autoimmune disorder (“1 in 10 people”, 2023). Autoimmune disorders are a category of conditions in which the body attacks itself. Although management systems for most of these types of conditions have been developed, autoimmune diseases still cannot be cured (“Autoimmune disorders”). In fact, even with management of their symptoms, up to 50% of patients with autoimmune disorders still experience impairment in their health-related quality of life (Pryce and Fontana, 2017). The development of so-called “inverse vaccines” may provide the much needed mechanism to help find a cure for this class of conditions by teaching the body not to attack itself.
A traditional vaccine works because it helps the body learn to recognize parts of foreign pathogens and builds up the body’s immune response against these pathogens so that the response is stronger and happens more quickly after recognition. In people with autoimmune diseases, the body also forms an immune response against self molecules because it mistakenly identifies them as foreign antigens, or pathogenic molecules (usually proteins or sugars) that induce an immune response. The idea behind “inverse vaccines” is that instead of building up the immune system’s response to foreign antigens, they could suppress the response to self-antigens by helping to teach the body to recognize these misidentified molecules as self.
A study led by Andrew Tremain at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine is one of the groups who are involved in this novel inverse vaccine research. The inverse vaccines they developed contain modified copies of the self-antigens that are targeted by the immune system which are attached to long chains of sugars called polysaccharides (Tremain et al., 2023). These polysaccharide chains guide the self-antigens to the liver, which plays an important role in the establishment of tolerance to these molecules. Once these modified self-antigens arrive at the liver, specialized immune cells pick them up and then inhibit the action of T cells against them through T cell uptake (Leslie, 2023). T cells are a type of immune cell that carry out part of the typical response against molecules identified as foreign or invaders through either cytotoxic or signaling based immune responses. The inhibition of the T cell response against misidentified self-antigens reduces or prevents the autoimmune response that causes the body to attack itself, thereby acting as a kind of “inverse vaccine”.
Once Tremain et al. developed their inverse vaccine, they conducted testing to determine its efficacy and viability as a method for increasing tolerance to self-antigens in those with autoimmune disorders. First, they wanted to ascertain whether inverse vaccines could truly provide inhibition of an immune response. To do this, they injected an egg white protein into mice as an experimental foreign antigen to trigger a strong immune response. Then an inverse vaccine against the egg white protein was injected to suppress the response to the original dose of the protein. In their analysis, they found that the T cells that would’ve responded to the egg white protein were not present. These results suggested that the inverse vaccine blocked the typical immune response, demonstrating viability as a treatment method against stimulated immune responses (Tremain et al. 2023).
However, Tremain and his colleagues still had to demonstrate the efficacy of inverse vaccines in inhibiting an autoimmune response rather than one caused by a foreign antigen. To do this, they induced an autoimmune disease called experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) in mice. In EAE, the immune system attacks myelin, the substance responsible for forming insulation around nerve cell axons. EAE is a particularly informative experimental model in mice because it mimics multiple sclerosis (MS), a human autoimmune disorder. Once they induced EAE, Tremain et al. injected an inverse vaccine made up of a polysaccharide carrying part of a myelin protein. Physiological analysis after injection suggested that this treatment had stopped mice from developing EAE. Furthermore, injection of a different inverse vaccine targeting an alternate form of EAE showed prevention of symptom relapse. This means that Tremain et al. were able to demonstrate inhibition of autoimmune responses against two types of EAE in mice, representing two different types of MS, providing a heartening outlook on this research (Tremain et al., 2023).
In summary, inverse vaccines had the ability to turn off immune responses to particular antigens in mice. These results are a promising sign for the ability of inverse vaccines to combat autoimmune diseases. Additionally, initial clinical trials testing the safety and efficacy of inverse vaccine strategy to increase tolerance to self-antigens in humans have had positive results so far for immune disorders such as multiple sclerosis and celiac disease where the misidentified self-antigens are known (Leslie, 2023). However research into tolerance-increasing strategies tends to stall both because we do not know which self-antigens are attacked in several autoimmune disorders, and because the mechanisms that produce tolerance after antigens are brought to the liver are not well understood (“Immune Tolerance”). This means that even if autoimmune vaccines prove to be a viable form of treatment for autoimmune disorders, they will only be able to treat diseases with known self-antigens until further research into the antigen and tolerance mechanisms is conducted. Nevertheless, inverse vaccine research is incredibly promising and has the potential to help hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Works Cited
Pryce, CR., and Fontana, A. (2017). Depression in autoimmune diseases. Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences, 31. https://doi.org/10.1007/7854_2016_7
1 in 10 people suffer from autoimmune diseases. (2023). Neuroscience News. https://neurosciencenews.com/population-autoimmune-disease-23198/
Autoimmune disorders. (n.d.). Retrieved November 5, 2023, from http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/autoimmune-disorders
Tremain, A.C., Wallace, R.P., Lorentz, K.M. et al. Synthetically glycosylated antigens for the antigen-specific suppression of established immune responses. Nat. Biomed. Eng 7, 1142–1155 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-023-01086-2
Leslie, M. (2023). ‘Inverse vaccine’ could help tame autoimmune diseases, Science. https://www.science.org/content/article/inverse-vaccine-could-help-tame-autoimmune-diseases
Immune Tolerance in Autoimmune Disease, Immune Tolerance Network. (n.d). Retrieved November 5, 2023, from https://www.immunetolerance.org/researchers/clinical-trials/autoimmune-disease
Understanding Multiple Sclerosis, Oregon Health and Science University. Retrieved November 5, 2023, from https://www.ohsu.edu/brain-institute/understanding-multiple-sclerosis