American Chemical Society's Weekly PressPac -- Sept...( Here is the latest American Chemical...)

Here is the latest American Chemical Society (ACS) News Service Weekly press package (PressPac) with reports selected from 36 major peer-reviewed journals and Chemical & Engineering News. With more than 160,000 members, ACS is the worlds largest scientific society. Please cite the individual journal, or the American Chemical Society, as the source of this information.

Vaccine-like treatment shows promise for fighting lupus
Molecular Pharmaceutics

Researchers in Indiana have developed a vaccine-like treatment that shows promise for treating lupus, a disease of the immune system that affects about 1.5 million people in the United States. The new treatment, described in the September/October issue of ACS Molecular Pharmaceutics, a bi-monthly journal, reduced disease symptoms and extended the lives of laboratory mice that researchers use to study lupus.

In the study, Philip S. Low and colleagues cite the need for better treatments for lupus, an autoimmune disorder in which the bodys immunological defense system attacks healthy cells, damaging muscles, joints, kidneys and other body parts. Current treatments for lupus also known as SLE include high doses of steroids and other medications with serious side effects.

The new approach targets abnormal immune cells in a way that marks the rogue cells for destruction by the bodys immune system without affecting healthy cells. Called folate-hapten-targeted immunotherapy, the treatment greatly reduced damage to the kidneys and other tissues and also prolonged the lives of the mice by 10 months in comparison to untreated animals, the researchers say.

We suggest that this therapy warrants further evaluation as a possible approach for treatment of SLE in humans, the report states.

ARTICLE #1 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Depletion of Folate-Receptor-Positive Macrophages Leads to Alleviation of Symptoms and Prolonged Surv
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