Vaccines are already commonly used to prevent a variety of infectious diseases. Now they may become a key therapeutic strategy for a whole new host of disorders: autoimmune. New research from Peter Terness, Thilo Oelert, Sandra Ehser and their groups at Heidelberg University Hospital and German Cancer Research Center (Heidelberg, Germany) shows some success in preventing development of encephalitis in vaccinated mice, which is similar to the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis (MS) in humans.

In autoimmune disease, the body's immune system responds to its own cells, producing antibodies to attack itself. This makes treatment of autoimmune diseases challenging. Existing treatments frequently suppress the immune response overall to halt disease progression, leaving the body susceptible to infection, or focus on the symptoms rather the underlying condition. A more ideal treatment for autoimmune disease would minimize the autoimmune reaction but preserve the rest of the immune response.

Terness and his team focus mainly on transplantation, researching ways to prevent rejection of transplanted organs or tissues without compromising the recipient's immune system. In previous work, they treated immune cells from a donor rat with mitomycin C (MMC), a chemotherapeutic drug; injected the treated cells into a recipient rat; and then transplanted heart tissue from the same donor to the recipient. In that study, the MMC-treated cells did not induce an immune reaction in the recipient, and the transplanted heart tissue was tolerated (Transplantation 83, 347–350; 2007).

According to Terness, the new vaccine they are developing against MS works in a similar manner to 'teach' the immune system not to fight against its own nerve cells. In this study, the scientists extracted immune cells from mice and loaded them with myelin basic protein, a component of the nervous system, which is the target of immune attack in MS. The cells were then treated with MMC and injected back into the same mice. This process rendered the mice resistant to experimental autoimmune encephalitis (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 105, 18442–18447; 2008), a disease that mirrors MS in humans and is frequently used as a model for MS research.

Having established that their strategy can prevent the development of encephalitis in mice, Terness's group plans to continue this line of research by investigating whether it is also effective in treating encephalitis in mice that have already developed the disease.