Flipping The Script On Novel Cancer Therapy Leads To Insights Into Lupus
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
In the last decade, scientists discovered that blocking a key regulator of the immune system helped unleash the body's natural defenses against several forms of cancer, opening up a new era of cancer immunotherapy. Now Yale scientists have essentially flipped this script and found that when impaired a molecularly similar regulator can cause the damaging immune system attacks on skin and organs that are the hallmark of the autoimmune disease lupus, they report Dec. 11 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
The study results help explain the origins of lupus and suggest novel ways researchers might be able to restore function of this inhibitor and provide much needed new therapy to treat the disease, the scientists said.
The immune system has a series of regulators designed to prevent it from attacking tissues in its host, a system that goes awry in autoimmune diseases. Yale researchers found that mice lacking an immune system inhibitor called programmed death-1 homolog, or PD-1H, spontaneously developed symptoms that resemble two forms of lupus -- systemic, in which the immune system attacks multiple organs; and cutaneous, which is marked by pronounced skin deformities.
Journal Reference:
Xue Han, Matthew D. Vesely, Wendy Yang, Miguel F. Sanmamed, Ti Badri, Jude Alawa, Francesc Lopez-Girildez, Patricia Gaule, Sang Won Lee, Jian-Ping Zhang, Xinxin Nie, Ala Nassar, Agedi Boto, Dallas B. Flies, Linghua Zheng, Tae Kon Kim, Gilbert W. Moeckel, Jennifer M. McNiff, Lieping Chen. PD-1H (VISTA)-mediated suppression of autoimmunity in systemic and cutaneous lupus erythematosus. Science Translational Medicine, 2019; 11 (522): eaax1159 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aax1159
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