Chronic immune-mediated diseases are common and greatly impact people’s lives. Current options for treating diseases like rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis are unsatisfactory because they only control disease progression, but do not cure it. Patients are typically treated lifelong with medicines that suppress their immune system, which improves their symptoms, but makes them more susceptible to infections and some cancers. In future, researchers think it might be possible to re-educate patients’ immune systems to stop harmful reactions by restoring a natural process called “immune regulation” that breaks down in patients.
One high-tech strategy to restore immune regulation in patients is using their own cells as medicine. This approach was studied by researchers in the INsTRuCT Consortium, an MSCA Doctoral Network focusing on scientific and technological innovations in myeloid regulatory cell (MRC)-based therapy. Over 4 years, INsTRuCT’s partners from academia and industry created a framework for advancing original basic scientific discoveries into novel cell products and processes, leading to higher quality immune therapies.
MRC-based therapies represent an attractive strategy for treating chronic immune-mediated diseases. Very importantly, because MRC-based therapy can induce antigen-specific immune non-reactivity, it could be used to treat the root cause of immune-mediated diseases, sparing the toxic effects of general immunosuppression. Moreover, because MRC-based therapy induces a self-reinforcing immune regulation, its clinical effects could be very long-lived. Hence, MRC-based therapy opens the remarkable possibility of curative therapy. First-generation MRC-based cell therapies are now being investigated in early-phase clinical trials across a broad range of indications, including solid organ transplantation, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and multiple sclerosis (MS). Preliminary success in these proof-of-principle studies justifies their further pharmaceutical development, hopefully leading to their implementation as routine medical treatment over the next 10 to 15 years.
