Summary
The challenge resides in the complexity of the biochemical and cellular pathways involved in tolerance, which is the immune system's ability to distinguish self from non-self, allowing the body to recognize and destroy invading viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens while ignoring the body's own tissue and organs. Clinicians divide autoimmune diseases into multiple categories based on systemic versus organ-specific autoimmunity, distinct roles of pathogenic antibodies versus pathogenic T cells, and complex mechanisms of action in the different disease settings. The largest group of autoimmune diseases consists of T cell-mediated autoimmune diseases, including type 1 diabetes (TlD), rheumatoid arthritis (RA), psoriasis, inflammatory bowel disease, and multiple sclerosis (MS), to name a few.
See the full content of this document
Extract
A Balanced Attack
During the past five to ten years, an evolution of thinking has taken place for scientists involved in autoimmunity research. The foundation ofthat new vision is this: Autoimmunity, at some level, exists in everyone. The human immune system does not eliminate all the potential cells that can attack the body that made them. Moreover, the immune system does this on purpose, to generate a system that has a broad repertoire for detecting infectious agents and cancer cells, and one that can self-regulate unwanted responses.
In most people, the immune system has a number of checks and balances that regulate self-reactive cells through a series of intrinsic and extrinsic factors - at least, most of the time. One class of T cells, called regulatory T cells, is designed to see self-antigen and control the potentially damaging cells.1 Consequently, immunologists adjusted their focus from trying to determine why autoreactive cells escape deletion to explori...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
