K. G. Jebsen Center for Specific Autoimmune Therapy

B cells are a type of white blood cell that is crucial to the immune system. The cells are best known for making antibodies, but they also have an important function in interacting with T cells, another type of white blood cell. These two cell types work together to fight viruses and bacteria. People with autoimmune diseases have a defect in their immune system that causes it to attack its own cells and tissues, as if some cells in the body were a virus. It has been shown that removing all the B cells in the body can be an effective way to treat autoimmune diseases. By using a type of treatment developed for cancer therapy on patients with very severe autoimmune disease, the autoimmune attack on one’s own tissue has stopped and the disease in these patients has apparently been cured. One type of such treatment is specially made (i.e. genetically modified) T cells (CAR-T cells) that can track down and remove all B cells. Another way is to add molecules (so-called BiTE) to the body that allow normal T cells to remove all B cells. Promising results have also been achieved in animal experiments and in laboratory models using such treatment reagents with the aim of removing only the B cells that cause the disease. In such treatment, surgical warfare is carried out instead of carpet bombing. This has so far only been shown for autoimmune diseases where the molecules (autoantigens) the immune system attacks are on the surface of the body’s cells. For many autoimmune diseases, the autoantigens are inside the cells. In the preparation of reagents that remove B cells targeting autoantigens inside the cells, there is a cell biology problem. At the K.G. Jebsen Center for Specific Immunotherapy, we want to solve this problem so that we can create new types of advanced immunotherapy that will find and remove the B cells that are involved in the autoimmune attack in diseases where the autoantigens are found inside the cells. We will work with this approach within four autoimmune diseases: systemic sclerosis, antisynthetase syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis and celiac disease.