Here we have a vaccine with treatment implications for allergies and many autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes and lupus. Charash added that a prevention strategy also might eventually be developed for the more common of these disorders using this type of vaccine. Forty-two rats were in the published experiment. J. Edwin Blalock, the study's lead investigator and an MDA-funded immunologist in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, confirmed that all the rats that were given myasthenia gravis and didn't receive the vaccine got the disease. What it probably does is render them unresponsive.
Antibodies are proteins produced by the immune system.
Myasthenia gravis affects about 36,000 people, mostly adults, in the United States, causing fluctuating muscle weakness and sometimes threatening life if it severely affects respiratory or swallowing muscles. Current treatments involve drugs that suppress the immune system, a process known as plasmapheresis that removes antibodies from the blood, and medications that prolong the effects of chemicals that transmit nerve signals. These treatments can't cure the disease and often only partially control it. The medications also can have serious side effects. The new vaccine strategy defends against the abnormal immunologic response to the docking sites by blocking the cells and antibodies involved in the response.