Bear Santamaria was 15 when he developed muscle weakness. This autoimmune condition causes severe muscle weakness and can sometimes lead to breathing difficulties. In the case of Santamaria, it affected the eye muscles that control his vision, which causes him to see weakness.
“He had a tremendous impact on personally,” he says. “I became a teenager, and suddenly I couldn’t exercise and could not live a normal life. I had to take very high doses of corticosteroids, which made me swell like a balloon.”
Worse, these drugs only reduce the general immune response to the body, rather than treating autoimmune causes, which means that Santamaria had no expectation that taking them would treat his condition.
With the passage of years, Santamaria has developed additional conditions for self -immunity – and determined to learn more about it. “I just wanted to understand diseases and mechanisms, hoping that I can help others in the end,” he says.
It has now made progress towards this goal. Work as an immunity doctor at Calgary University in Canada, Santamaria At the forefront of a batch to develop new treatments to reprogram the immune system and encourage the human body to end its destroyed war against its tissues.
With these treatments moving to clinical trials, there are promising signs. In fact, some of them are so effective that one dose has been left, in a few cases, symptoms free for years. Is the end of autoimmune conditions now on the horizon?
Wild and adaptive immunity systems
Our bodies have several defense lines against pathogens. …