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this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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When this was posted before someone who followed it fairly closely and others like it, updated the thread with info because the article was behind current info. They had already stopped the trials for MS because it wasn't working. So they began to just focus on one other, the Crohn's, I believe. Figuring if they got one to work, they could go back to the others and get them on the right track.
I have MS, and while this is a new approach, there have been so many articles about treatments that end up going nowhere after the first excitement. So it is still very early to get hopes up.
Hope can be a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane, as Red said.
Is it possible that other person was just full of shit?
Here was an update posted on Sept 12th, 2023 from the company behind the trials regarding the MS trials:
This says that the single dose (SAD) phase 1 trial which began in 2020 was completed and they moved on to the second multiple ascending dose trial (MAD) for MS which completed enrollment and expect results in 2024. And that the preliminary data from the first MAD trial indicates therapeutic response.
And the press release talks about how they've moved on to a phase 2 trial for its use for celiacs (the initial trial use case). And then on Oct 12th they announced they will be presenting data from their phase 1 for celiacs at a conference.
A week after the announcement quoted above they released the news about their peer reviewed paper mentioning the early success in both (what likely inspired OP's article), saying:
None of this looks like a company that has a failing drug on their hands. And there's no indication of the MS trial being ended early - the only thing that happened early was completing enrollment early.
Being too ready to give up on hope is its own kind of insanity.
T1 diabetes here. A cure is just 5 years away...
They told me, when I was diagnosed in 1992.
It always 5 years if properly funded. It's never properly funded so always 5 years.
They are testing an artificial pancreas currently. The cost is the issue as always.
We can genetically engineer bacteria to mimic the missing pancreatic cells, and it's not too different to the way most insulin is produced as all that's new is the system to stop producing insulin when blood sugars are already low enough. However, if you put them in a person, the immune system attacks the bacteria, so they need isolating. To do that, we need a membrane that lets sugar in and insulin out, but doesn't let antigens or live bacteria out, and doesn't let immune cells in. Even if the bacteria are held in place, if immune cells can get in, it's no better than a pancreatic transplant as you'll still need immunosuppressants, and they're generally worse than dealing with type one manually. Development of the membrane keeps hitting unexpected hurdles, so artifical pancreases are still unable to start trials, and then they might take a decade.
There are other approaches, e.g. using electronics to control photosensitive insulin producing bacteria, but they don't have any advantages (the membrane still has to let sugar in so the bacteria can eat) and have more things that can go wrong.
In theory, and this is another couple of major advancements of this tech away, if you can teach the body to stop attacking specific cells you can do a transplant without rejection. Teach the body to not attack the new pancreas, then stick it in there.
This should be possible with this tech, though it would require a mature and advanced process compared to what we have now. Genetic chimeras can exist without the immune system going crazy, presumably because it recognizes all those parts as "part of the body". If it can be taught to recognize other implanted material as acceptable that opens up a huge range of options. Even a lifetime of immune system training therapy is better than a lifetime of immunosuppressants.
Ultimately what they need to do is decipher stem cell development and fetal development and use the patient's own cells to replace the lost islet cells.
If you don't have a solution to the autoimmune aspect, then a stem-cell-based treatment is no better than one with engineered bacteria or someone else's cells. The originals are gone because the body mistakenly thought they were foreign. A treatment like the article discusses might make stem cells more viable than the alternatives, though, as they'd be less foreign, so need less immune system alteration.
Commercially viable fusion is always 20 yrs away so keep your chin up
Well damn, I got MS too but caught it fairly early. I'm hoping for a major breakthrough before it gets really bad.
I came for the Orange reference, but was not disappointed by Red.
So, if I understand this right, a more accurate title would be "Research into vaccines against autoimmune diseases continues, new data indicate that a change of focus might be needed"
have Crohn's. fingers crossed 🤞🏽