The Immune Tolerance Network (ITN) is currently developing a clinical trial to test a new treatment for vitiligo, an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks pigment containing cells in the skin leading to disfiguring white spots.
The ITN is currently seeking proposals for clinical trials for novel therapeutic approaches to induce B cell tolerance in patients who are donor-sensitized and/or to prevent sensitization.
ITN’s recently published article, reporting the mechanistic results from the GRASS clinical trial, was highlighted in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology’s Editors’ Choice Feature in its May 2018 issue.
The gold standard to diagnose food allergy is an oral food challenge (OFC), but it can cause severe allergic reactions in some individuals. Reliable in vitro tests would eliminate undesirable aspects of OFCs, allowing easier and safer diagnoses and assessments of clinical responses to treatments.
This week on WRVO Public Radio's Take Care, hosts Lorraine Rapp and Linda Lowen talk with Dr. Gerald Nepom, director of the Immune Tolerance Network, about the ITN's LEAP study and the new guidelines for the introduction of peanut products that might prevent high risk children from developing the allergy.
In an important follow-up to LEAP-On, which demonstrated that the early introduction of peanut in high-risk infants led to durable prevention of peanut allergy, the investigators now show that early consumption of peanut in infants at high risk of peanut allergy is allergen-specific and does not prevent the development of other allergic disease to other foods, aeroallergens, or allergic reactions to tree nuts and sesame.
ITN’s BRAVOS (Evaluation of Brentuximab Vedotin for Diffuse Cutaneous System Sclerosis) has opened for recruitment. The goal of this clinical trial is to determine the safety of an investigational study drug, brentuximab vedotin (ADCETRIS®), in diffuse cutaneous systemic sclerosis (dcSSc).
An article published today in the American Journal of Transplantation examined the prevalence of a previously identified genetic signature associated with tolerance in a cohort of kidney transplant patients who may benefit from immunosuppression minimization. A transplant recipients’ lifetime use of immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection exposes them to health complications associated with drug toxicity and long-term immunosuppression.
Immunotherapy that exposes hay-fever patients to increasing amounts of grass pollen over time can be an effective way to reduce severe allergic symptoms in the long term.
In a study appearing online in Neurology, the HALT-MS trial demonstrated that patients with active relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) showed sustained remission out to 5 years following high dose immunosuppressive therapy combined with autologous hematopoietic cell transplantation