The solution may be in the vaccine that works the other way around

I considered dedicating this space to the presentation of the supposed “alien mummies of Nasca” in Mexico, but there is no news about it. Except that to the usual questions (why do they continue to present themselves to politicians and not to scientists? and why is there no published study?) we add: how did they leave Peru?

For this reason, I preferred to write about an investigation that, although it is in its initial stages, . It is a study carried out by researchers from the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago (USA), recently published in the journal “Nature Biomedical Engineering”.

Reverse vaccine

If there is one thing we learned during the pandemic, it was how vaccines work. These teach an organism’s immune system to identify external aggressors (viruses or bacteria) and know how to defend itself against them. On the other hand,

So what these American researchers have done is develop a “reverse vaccine.” And they call him that because does exactly the opposite of what is expected of a conventional vaccine: it eliminates the immune system’s memory of one molecule.

Of course, if it were an infectious disease, eliminating the body’s immune memory would be fatal. But in the case of autoimmune diseases – such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, etc. – their progression would be stopped.

The role of the liver

This organ is responsible for putting flags with the message “do not attack” the decomposed molecules. Those little flags are N-acetylgalactosamine (pGal), a monosaccharide or simple sugar. It does so because they are cells that must die and be discarded by natural processes. If the body itself attacks them, autoimmune reactions would occur.

What the researchers did was place an antigen (a molecule attacked by the immune system) together with a molecule similar to a fragment of an aged cell labeled with pGal. As a result,

But for all this to work, the role of T cells is important. In the immune system, they have the important job of recognizing unwanted or foreign cells and molecules (from viruses and bacteria to cancers) and getting rid of them. . But these cells can also go wrong, which leads to the appearance of autoimmune diseases.

According to Jeffrey Hubbell, lead author of the study, in a statement released by the University of Chicago, and that the reverse vaccine reduces immunity in a very specific way.

The good thing is that, in this study focused on multiple sclerosis, they were successful. The immune system stopped attacking the body and the nerves functioned correctly again. and there is still a lot of research to know if they will work in the same way in humans.

There are many loose ends, but also many trials in progress. The important thing here is to recognize how science done well is more likely to find solutions to problems that seemed impossible. Let’s not stop trusting and always betting on science.