News Release

Postraumatic vaccination for spinal cord injury

Peer-Reviewed Publication

JCI Journals

Here Hauben and coworkers explore a remarkable strategy by which animals may be vaccinated against the effects of spinal cord injury. While vaccination could hardly be expected to prevent a physical trauma, the authors note that much of the tissue destruction and nerve death that leads to paralysis following mild trauma to the spine occurs a week or more after injury and is mediated by immune cells. Building on their previous observation that exogenous T cells specific for CNS self antigens can block these harmful responses, Hauben et al. have tested whether vaccination with CNS proteins or peptides can activate endogenous T cells to provide mice a similar protective autoimmunity. Such a strategy walks a knife’s edge, since similar treatments in some mouse strains are used to induce a experimental autoimmune encephalitis (EAE), a model of multiple sclerosis. The possibility that a similar pathological response could occur, perhaps variably, in humans would clearly need to be addressed before this approach could be considered for the clinic. Nevertheless, Hauben et al. show here that one well studied variant of a myelin basic protein epitope can be used in either EAE-prone or EAE-insensitive mouse strains to promote protective autoimmune responses and prevent the paralysis that would otherwise occur following injury.

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