A risky cancer treatment can be modified to treat immune diseases

Immunotherapy—cajoling the body’s immune system into attacking cancerous cells it might otherwise ignore—has, over the past decade, joined chemotherapy, radiation, targeted drugs and surgery as one of the . But tinkering with the immune system has other uses. They may include treating the immune system itself.In a paper in , James Howard Jr of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Tahseen Mozaffar of University of California, Irvine, describe how immunotherapy might be used to correct an immune system that has itself gone haywire. The researchers aim to use it to battle myasthenia gravis, an auto-immune disease that causes a sufferer’s immune system to attack the connections between nerve cells and muscles, resulting in weakness and frailty.