Civil war in the immune system

Autoimmunity seems like a model for the immune system gone awry, but things could be a lot worse, say Gizi Wildbaum, Menahem Nahir, and Nathan Karin (Technion, Haifa, Israel). They find that the immune system responds to autoimmunity, and thus keeps itself in check, by making antibodies to its own pro-inflammatory mediators.

Clues to this self-regulatory behavior emerged from earlier immunization studies. The group succeeded in combating autoimmune diseases by injecting adjuvant plus DNA vaccines encoding pro-inflammatory mediators. Antibodies against the vaccine-encoded mediators apparently dampened both inflammation and disease. But this antibody response looked less like a de novo response and more like the amplification of an existing response.

Sure enough, when the Israeli group looked in models of autoimmunity, they found antibody responses against common...