Pere Santamaria was 15 years old when she developed myasthenia. This autoimmune condition can cause extreme muscle weakness and sometimes lead to difficulty breathing. In Santa Maria's case, it affected the muscles in the eye that controlled his vision, causing him to look double.
“It personally had a huge impact on me,” he says. “I was in adolescence and suddenly I couldn't play sports and couldn't live a normal life. I had to take very high doses of corticosteroids, so I was able to have balloons. It's inflated like that.”
Worse, these drugs simply attenuate the body's general immune response, rather than addressing the causes of autoimmune. In other words, Santa Maria did not expect that taking them would cure his condition.
As years went by, Santa Maria developed an additional autoimmune state. “I just wanted to understand the disease and mechanisms, and hopefully I can help others in the end,” he says.
He is now progressing towards that goal. He works as an immunologist at the University of Calgary, Canada. Santa Maria It is at the forefront of pushing to reprogram the immune system and develop new therapies to encourage the human body to end a destructive war against its own organization.
As these treatments move to clinical trials, there are signs of promise. Certainly, some are very effective, so with a single dose, in some cases, people have been symptomatically gone for years. So, is the end of an autoimmune state visible now?
Innate and Adaptive Immunity Systems
Our bodies have several lines of defense against pathogens. …
Source: www.newscientist.com
