Immunotherapy as a therapeutic treatment for neurodegenerative disorders

Human neurodegenerative illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease exact an enormous cost on individuals, families and society. For these and related disorders, current treatment is largely symptomatic without influencing the underlying disease process. Until recently, the development of immunotherapeutic approaches to neurodegenerative disorders had been almost completely ignored despite growing successes against other non-infectious diseases such as cancer. However, since Schenk and colleagues described the antibody-mediated clearance of amyloid plaques in a transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, a number of studies have confirmed the feasibility of this strategy for several neurodegenerative disorders including Huntington's disease and prion diseases. These reports offer the exciting prospect that either the immune system or its derivative components can be harnessed to fight the misfolded and/or aggregated proteins that accumulate in many neurodegenerative illnesses. If the remarkable power of clonal expansion, specificity and efficiency of the immune system can successfully inactivate these abnormal proteins, real hope exists that effective immunotherapeutic treatments for neurodegenerative illnesses may be available in the near future.