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Gut feeling yields evidence of microbial involvement in autoimmunity

Intestinal microbes shape the course of diseases such as Crohn’s disease, type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis — and could even help to keep them in check.
  1. Elizabeth Svoboda

    1. Elizabeth Svoboda is a science writer based in San Jose, California.

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As neurologist Anne-Katrin Pröbstel treated people with multiple sclerosis (MS), she began to notice something unusual. MS is understood to make the body’s immune cells attack the central nervous system. Pröbstel and her colleagues at the University Hospital of Basel in Switzerland therefore treated people with a drug called rituximab, which lowers immune B cell counts. The treatment relieved inflammation and reduced the risk of relapse. Another drug, atacicept, gets rid of even more B cells. Yet when specialists prescribed atacicept, it paradoxically had the opposite effect to rituximab1. “It triggered relapses,” Pröbstel says. “Nobody had a clue why.”

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Nature 595, S54-S55 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01837-8

This article is part of Nature Outlook: Autoimmune disease, an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties. About this content.

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