Naive question : about immunogenicity, what are the problems with the obvious strategy to counter it ? (target the thymus first to “whitelist” the delivery method).
You know, I actually looked into this at one point.
At the time I didn’t find any obvious reason why it wouldn’t work. But I didn’t spend that much time digging into the details, so my prior is it will be hard for some reason I haven’t discovered yet.
If you could actually find a way to present aribtrary “self-antigens” to T and B cells during the development phase within the thymus, that would be an incredibly powerful technology. It seems plausible to me that we could potentially cure a large percentage of autoimmune conditions with that technology, provided we knew which epitopes were triggering a particular immune response. But I know much less about this area than about gene editing, so it’s entirely plausible I’m wrong.
There’s already a few therapies that basically take this approach; allergy shots are probably the most basic, though I don’t believe they actually do anything with the thymus. The general term for this approach seems to be “Immune Tolerance”.
With a short search, I don’t see anything about reprogramming the thymus.
Naive question : about immunogenicity, what are the problems with the obvious strategy to counter it ? (target the thymus first to “whitelist” the delivery method).
You know, I actually looked into this at one point.
At the time I didn’t find any obvious reason why it wouldn’t work. But I didn’t spend that much time digging into the details, so my prior is it will be hard for some reason I haven’t discovered yet.
If you could actually find a way to present aribtrary “self-antigens” to T and B cells during the development phase within the thymus, that would be an incredibly powerful technology. It seems plausible to me that we could potentially cure a large percentage of autoimmune conditions with that technology, provided we knew which epitopes were triggering a particular immune response. But I know much less about this area than about gene editing, so it’s entirely plausible I’m wrong.
There’s already a few therapies that basically take this approach; allergy shots are probably the most basic, though I don’t believe they actually do anything with the thymus. The general term for this approach seems to be “Immune Tolerance”.
With a short search, I don’t see anything about reprogramming the thymus.