Caveat: Here is one of my guiding principles, it should be yours as well: Any cure for any one autoimmune disease could be the one cure for all autoimmune disease.
With the above in mind here are three vaccines that could cure you tomorrow if we organized and demanded them, now not later!
All three of these vaccines have already worked in laboratory animals. While the researchers take two or three decades to go from mice and rats, to dogs and pigs then monkeys, then phase IA clinical trials, phase IB, etc, we are suffering and dying. Read the following and wonder why we cannot have the cures today.
First kind of vaccine cure is a kind of allergy shot. It is what the allergy doctors like to call immunotherapy. It is being developed at UCLA by Allan J. Tobin and in Copenhagen by Johnny Ludvigsson. Diamyd Medical (http://www.diamyd.com/) andAviaraDx of Carlsbad, California are conducting phase II human testing for autoimmune diabetes (type I diabetes) using this technology.
Allergy shots" to cure autoimmune disese is in the News again. This time a protein target for MS utoantibodies has been found. When this protein is given in small amounts over time, the MS mouse immune system "learns" to ignore the protein and quits making autoantibodies. The mice get well. Here is the URL:
<http://www.genengnews.com/news/bnitem.aspx?name=18993382&source=genwire>
Below is a sentence taken from the article:
"When they gave injections of the protein to mice with the equivalent of MS, their paralysis was reversed. The protein restored order by suppressing the cellular processes causing the damage. Dr. Steinman speculated that the mechanism is tolerization, similar to the process used in allergy shots when a person with an allergy gets an injection of the protein that is causing problems for the body so it can learn to ignore it."
"Allergy shot vaccines have the potential to cure ANY autoimmue disease. The only minor difficulty is identifying the exact protein target of the autoantibodies of that particular disease. However, identifying those proteins under attack is relatively straightforward using an autoimune patients blood serum, a protein microarray, and automated scanning.Once identified the protein would be given as "allergy shots" in increasing concentrations over a number of weeks--in six months no autoimmune disease.
When will it happen? Tomorrow if we work together, in fifty years otherwise. So many ways to cure you, to cure me, and to cure my horribly afflicted son; but not a one available for humans. To paraphrase an Anient Mariner, "Cures, cures, everywhere and not a one to use."
Disease-modifying immunotherapy for the management of autoimmune diabetes.