In myasthenia gravis, the immune system mistakenly attacks specialized docking sites on muscle cells that normally receive and process signals from nerve cells and allow muscles to work. The new vaccine defends against these attacks. We can now advance toward a clinical trial of a vaccine for myasthenia gravis. Simultaneously, we can work to determine vaccine potential for polymyositis and dermatomyositis - two other neuromuscular diseases caused by unwanted immune responses. Charash said he expects these MDA initiatives will interest scientists and clinicians worldwide.
Vaccines are usually prevention-based.
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.