Monday, April 9, 2007

'Allergy shot' Therapy, an Autoimmune Cure?


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.

Allan Tobin discovered the protein in the insulin producing cells (beta cells in the Isles of Langerhans) in the pancreas that are being attacked in at least some people with autoimmune diabetes. He and his Swedish colleagues are using small amounts of that protein to inject into autoimmune diabetic patients to try to get their immune systems to tolerate the protein and stop the attack on the insulin making cells in the pancreas. And it works!

Allergy shots therapy is left over 19th century medicine that was grandfathered in to modern medicine at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is based on taking “the hair of the dog that bit you” as a treatment.

Today researchers have discovered the probable reason it works. By giving very tiny amounts of the substance your body reacts to (an allergen), a tolerance to that substance builds for most people. It is now believed by immune researchers that the tolerance is achieved through the production of protective WBCs called T-regulatory cells (T-regs) or through the conversion of attack cells called T-effectors from attack mode to protective (tolerance) mode.

Tolerant immune systems do not react to harmless or self (auto)antigens. Tolerant immune systems can tell the difference between the harmless stuff all around and inside of us and harmful pathogens. Tolerant immune systems only attack harmful pathogens and do not get confused by anything else. We really want to encourage tolerance. Dr. Tobin's vaccine does just that.

Dr. Tobin is using the protein under attack (GAD) in autoimmune diabetes as an “allergy shot” to promote tolerance to GAD. Google: UCLA neuroscience research leads to a possible treatment for type 1 diabetes. (September 15, 2006)

How does allergy shot immunotherapy help others with autoimmune disease? If GAD is also under attack in your autoimmune disease, then the cure is yours as well.

What if the target of the immune attack is different and not GAD? Then we find that protein target and convert it into an allergy shot vaccine as well. The allergy shot therapy of Dr. Tobin would work for your autoimmune disease as well.

To find the protein (antigen, epitope) under attack in your body is as easy as drawing some of your blood and doing a little lab work. The protein could be found in a day or less.

Here is how. Use a centrifuge to isolate the antibodies in the liquid part of your blood, then test those antibodies against a selection of fluorescently labeled proteins from the part of your body under attack. A series of microarrays could be used with automated reading equipment to find the protein (antigen/epitope). Once the particular protein for your autoimmune disease were found, it could be used for your own autoimmune/‘allergy’ shots.

In a few weeks you would be feeling a whole lot better. Start this process today, by Christmas you are a different person--a person with a "toleratant" immune system. With any luck you could be in autoimmune remission.

But do not get your hopes up. It will not happen by this Christmas or next. It will not happen for decades even though it works in lab animals right now. Why? FDA regulations, researchers afraid of losing funding, old ninnies on Institution Review Boards, and regulations that encourage caution to the point of no progress rather than cures.

Think about being cured. Think about your loved ones being cured. Wouldn’t that be nice. But it will not happen until you get angry. Write to the FDA. Write to your local newspaper. Write to your Congressman. Demand this technology be put into widespread use, now not later! Demand all forty mice cures be tested on all autoimmune diseases today! not next decade.

My time is up for now. I have to go take care of Paul. I will post more about the other vaccine cures later. They are even more promising then the allergy shot cure. The other vaccines are likely to work on one hundred percent of us. The allergy shot autoimmune cure is not likely to work on all of us, just like allergy shots do not work on all allergy sufferers.

By the welcome new reader, Barbara Yodice, Founder of the Autoimmune Information Network. Check out her website: << http://aininc.org/index.html>>

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was never asked to have my name used in tbis article on tbis subject.

There is not enough info to to agree or disagree.