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My name is Herman Waldmann from the Department of Pathology, Oxford University.
I'm going to be talking about
therapeutic antibodies for the induction immunological tolerance.
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All of you will be familiar with the notion
of short-term treatment from long-term benefit.
This was a notion applied to drugs using penicillin to treat bacterial infections,
and very hard to imagine that one would want to give penicillin for
life to treat an illness that is debilitating.
The attraction of antibiotics was of
course the market gives them for a few days and cure.
Yet, when come to a whole range of immunological diseases,
we find ourselves with the drug industry providing
treatments that many people have to take
indefinitely for long periods and they costs a lot of money.
Why are they not drugs that can be given short term
for long-term benefit in diseases like multiple sclerosis,
kidney transplantation, type one diabetes,
rheumatoid arthritis, and so on.
Why are we giving drugs that lasts and have to be given forever?
Well, of course there are number of reasons.
Some as we haven't found such treatments yet.
Second, perhaps a little more disturbing is the possibility that
commercial organizations can't see a business
in giving drugs short-term for long-term benefit.
I'd hate to imagine that that was true, and thirdly,
there may be there hasn't been a business plan generated that will enable
short-term treatment to be attractive to pharmaceutical companies today.
If whether we can find ways of manipulating
the immune system to enable it to become tolerant of transplants,
and become tolerant again to autoimmune disorders,
like Multiple Sclerosis and diabetes,
and what are the principles that underlie the generation of such tolerance?
I'm going to be using his probes antibodies that target molecules of the immune system,
and I'm going to show you that we can with antibodies in rodents,
give short-term treatments to get long-term benefits that
stop unwanted immune responses using transplantation
as my model system but such principles could easily apply to
autoimmune diseases and other forms of chronic immune pathology.
