Inside the new therapies promising to finally beat autoimmune disease

Pere Santamaria was 15 when he developed myasthenia gravis. This autoimmune condition causes extreme muscle weakness and can sometimes lead to breathing difficulties. In Santamaria’s case, it affected the ocular muscles controlling his vision, making him see double.

“It had a tremendous effect on me personally,” he says. “I was becoming an adolescent, and all of a sudden I couldn’t play sports and I couldn’t live a normal life. I had to take very high doses of corticosteroids, which made me swell up like a balloon.”

Worse, these drugs only dampen down the body’s general immune response, rather than addressing the causes of autoimmunity, meaning Santamaria had no expectation that taking them would ever cure his condition.

As the years passed, Santamaria developed additional autoimmune conditions – and a determination to learn more about them. “I just wanted to understand the diseases and mechanisms, with the hope I could eventually help others,” he says.

He has now made progress towards that goal. Working as an immunologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, Santamaria is at the forefront of a push to develop new therapies to reprogram the immune system and encourage the human body to end its destructive war against its own tissues.

As those therapies move into clinical trials, there are promising signs. Indeed, some are so effective that a single dose has, in a few cases, left people symptom-free for years. So is the end of autoimmune conditions now in sight?

Innate and adaptive immune systems

Our bodies have several lines of defence against pathogens. …