With more than 50 million people in the U.S. being challenged by autoimmunity, autoimmune diseases are the closest thing in the Western world to a 21st-century plague. In fact, over the last half-century, studies show that the incidence of common autoimmune diseases has doubled and even tripled, especially amongst children. And while more people today live with autoimmunity than those with heart disease and cancer, autoimmune diseases are underdiagnosed, undertreated, underreported, understudied, and underfunded.
But thanks to exciting advances in regenerative medicine, relief for people who once had no hope is closer than ever. Breakthrough treatments for common diseases like Crohn's Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, and Psoriasis are now on the horizon and proving to aid in this devastating condition that afflicts a whopping one out of seven Americans.
But before we dive into these groundbreaking technologies, let’s explore what autoimmune diseases are in the first place.
Understanding Autoimmune Disease
Autoimmune diseases occur when your immune system attacks the healthy cells of your organs by mistake. The result? Relentless pain, soul-killing exhaustion, a severe loss of function, and, in severe cases, reduced life expectancy.
While scientists differ about the specific triggers for autoimmunity, it’s now widely accepted that the root cause of autoimmune disease is inflammation. Inflammation is your body’s response to healing, but the wrong kind of inflammation, and the wrong kind of it, takes a toll on the body.
Let’s say that you sustain an ankle injury. Your body sends an SOS alarm throughout the body, enabling immune cells to start repairs. But if the original injury never gets fixed, or keeps getting repeated, the result is chronic inflammation, which causes your immune system to go into overdrive. Unfortunately, most autoimmune patients get trapped into an inflammatory loop, and a lifetime of pain and addictive painkillers.
While there are over 100 autoimmune diseases, here are the ones that are the most prevalent threats, and what they do to the body:
Crohn’s disease: The immune system mauls the cells of the large or small intestines, causing inflammation of the digestive tract.
Rheumatoid arthritis: The immune system wrecks the membranes that line the fingers and toes, ankles, and wrists, causing pain, swelling, stiffness and loss of joint function.
Type 1 diabetes: The immune system attacks the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas, causing it to produce little or no insulin.
Multiple sclerosis: The immune system shorts out the wiring of our central nervous system, leading to a multitude of debilitating symptoms.
Lupus: The immune system tears into kidneys, lungs, skin, heart, and brain, causing joint pain, fever, skin rashes, and organ damage.
There’s been no definitive cure for any of these diseases, but luckily, a number of emerging therapies are offering a fresh approach to restore balance, and get the body back to its natural immune set point.
Emerging Therapies in the Fight Against Autoimmune Disease
Here are a few of the greatest advances in the fight against autoimmune disease:
Bioelectronic Medicine:
Bioelectronics takes aim at a specific bundle of nerve fibers, targeting the tissues or organs where the immune system has run amok, but nowhere else. The therapy, which helps patients with Crohn’s Disease, calms inflammation by depressing cytokine levels but stops short of wiping them out.
In a 2017 clinical trial of 16 Crohn’s patients — none of whom had responded to conventional therapies — results were impressive, with patients showing markedly less inflammation, greater mobility, fewer hospital admissions. Four of those eight made it all the way to remission, with little or no residual disease, and no side effects. While bioelectronic medicine shows promise, it’s still in an early stage of testing.
Stem Cells:
Stem cells help the body control its immune response, and researchers at a company called Mesoblast have found a way to replenish the body when they start to diminish.
Here’s how it works: A highly concentrated dose of stem cells collected from healthy adult donors is injected into the patient. When the injected stem cells sense signals from injured tissue, they release a first-wave of anti-inflammatory cytokines.
In the second wave, stem cells secrete growth factor cocktails to build new blood vessels and improve both circulation and oxygen supply. While the stem cells leave the body after a couple of months, the secreted growth factors circulate for a year or more, recalibrating the body’s immune system to its natural setting.
Mesoblast therapies have shown dramatic promise and are close to FDA approval for Rheumatoid arthritis, end-stage heart failure, and back pain.
Blood Plasma:
Researchers are exploring a concept called therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE) to slow the effects of aging in humans and help patients with autoimmune diseases. TPE works by separating out aging plasma and reinfusing the person with their old blood cells, plus a plasma replacement fluid composed mostly of fresh albumin (the major protein in plasma) and saline. In this fashion, the inflammatory blood factors are winnowed out.
TPE has already been proven to help patients with autoimmune diseases like myasthenia gravis and Guillain-Barre syndrome, or those with relapses of multiple sclerosis. Recently, it’s been shown to slow the cognitive decline of Alzheimer’s patients by 66%.
Neutrolis:
This therapy involves the most prevalent white blood cell in our immune system, the neutrophil. When neutrophils are helping to repair a wound after you damage your skin, they actually release the DNA from the nucleus to trap the enemy. This mass of DNA, called neutrophil extracellular traps, or NETs, sticks and helps to close and heal a wound — a biological bandage of sorts. The problems start when neutrophils are signaled to release their NETs at the wrong time or in the wrong place, and this can be one of the fundamental causes of lupus, Crohn's disease, psoriasis, and rheumatoid arthritis.
Immunologists out of a Boston-based biotech company, Neutrolis, have invented a technology — a molecular scissor that cuts up free-floating DNA — to chop NETs (composed of DNA) into small pieces. Once the NETs are slashed, their fragments get cleared from the body. The bottom line? Significantly lower inflammation.
As you can see, these latest breakthroughs can be invaluable in fighting this debilitating disease. Though many of these advances are in relatively early stages, the returns so far are strongly encouraging.
