Hear me out, measles can cause immune system amnesia. People with autoimmune disorders have immune systems that want to kill them. What if we use the immune system amnesia property of measles to reset the immune system of people suffering with autoimmune disorders? Maybe we could do some crispr on the measles virus to make it not as dangerous or something like that first though.
last time i asked this question i was called an idiot just for asking (and it was no stupid questions), so i’m not chiming in
to be fair, it does sound like a very stupid question.
so like hey if you work on a phd in this, let me know please i’m really curious
i mean, do we really understand the mechanism by which measles does the reset all that well? that’s my first question, but you know.
Not an expert but I am a patient.
Immune system reset is already a type of therapy for MS. Lemtrada and Mavenclad are two brand name drugs that work on this principle. You don’t take them for life. That’s good because they make you very ill, but after 2 rounds of treatment you can go years without needing any further therapy.
Could the measles virus work better than these drugs? Maybe, but all the reasons at the top of the comments present challenges.
Did you watch ‘I am Legend’? This is exactly what starts the apocalypse lol
Side note, book was waaaayyyyy better
Because it is a LOT more complicated than that.
Not all rheumatological diseases are due to the immune system’s memory. As a case in point, Ankylosing Spondylitis is theorized as being caused by a mis-folded HLA-B27 protein response. The mis-folded protein response is caused by cellular stress, at least that is the theory. The lead singer of Imagine Dragon Dan Reynolds suffers from this disease. So there are people out there suffering from it, it’s not just some disease out in left field no one has heard of before.
Are there diseases that could be treated by clearing the immune system’s memory? Possibly, but there would also be consequences for that as well. Mainly, because the actual method by which the memory works is not completely understood.
Disclaimer: My wife is a Rheumatologist that does both basic research and clinical work. What I wrote above is based on what I have gleaned from her over the years. Any mistakes or misconceptions are strictly mine. I’m just an old IT guy and have never studied medicine.
This sounds like the kind of thought an antivaxer would have to justify why they don’t actually need vaccines. They are just resetting their immune system with this one simple hack called “being infected”.
No.
