the iconic coca cola bottle is meant to reflect the ideal female form, with a slender waist, a wide bust and hips that lead directly to five short, scuttling legs at the bottom
CBR.com recently challenged a number of artists to draw a variety of superheroes punching Nazis. This post features several of our staff favorites from this challenge–Squirrel Girl, Ms. Marvel, Jack Kirby, Lobo, and Captain America. You can see the complete collection here, which also includes a rare battle between Wolverine and The Straw Man.
The stage that they’re at is animal testing but it sounds like it’s been successful in mouse and primate models.
My understanding: The way autoimmune diseases usually seem to work* is the immune system is “flagging” the wrong thing as harmful/not needed and destroying it. The typical treatments for autoimmune diseases are just tamping the entire immune system down so it can’t destroy anything, which leaves a person vulnerable to infection.
The newer method is basically “tricking” the body using a method that… the human body already came up with. Cells flagging the wrong thing apparently happens all the time, so there are multiple defenses against immune disease, and one of them is in the liver. So scientists figured out a way to tell the body “hey, you flagged this wrong” and sent it to the liver and the liver/body recognized this signal.
There is still a lot of work to be done and it sounds like this isn’t foolproof (ie: what if the liver is whats broken? unsure, and what if the immune system flags things wrong again?) but this is literally so amazing. i was tearing up reading it, and i hope that everything goes well in clinical trials.
*theres like a lot medical science doesnt know about the immune system
Thank you for this explanation/synthesis of the article! It’s important for us to understand that they’re still in early development and testing of these methods, but also that they’ve seen it work in mice and primates (rather than just petri dishes of human cells). I hope this goes well.
Hi! I’m a microbiologist and I’ve done work in academia, pharma, and clinical trials.
So the most exciting thing about this article is the last paragraph tbh (working on getting the actual paper, it’s not up on sci-hub yet).
The company mentioned, Anokion, has four registered clinical trials for both Celiac and MS patients. The trial for Celiac just submitted data from their phase 1 trial (meaning there’s good data it is safe) and are recruiting for a Phase ½ trial (meaning they are now testing efficacy). After that, the big hurdle is phase 3, which looks at whether or not it is better than a current treatment. The projected completion date is spring 2025. They are also preparing for a Phase 2 trial but are not yet recruiting.
The phase 1 MS trial is currently active, estimated completion in summer 2024.
I checked the company website and it looks like they are in the process of submitting an investigational new drug (IND) application for Type 1 diabetes. This is the first step to starting clinical safety and efficacy trials.
Now clinical trials can get delayed for a variety of reasons, but this is a really good sign! It’s way further along than I initially thought when seeing the news. If the treatment does well, we could see new drugs on the market for Celiacs as early at 2030ish and MS as early as 2035.
I literally just burst into tears and woke up my partners.
Holy shit. The idea of not having celiac disease anymore is so completely overwhelming.
Update: I have registered for the trial and if you also have celiac and want to register the link is here.
ALT
