Experimental Study Of SLE Oral Immune Tolerance Induced By Recombinant Nucleosomal Universal Th Cell Epitope

Background and objectivesSystemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a chronic autoimmune disease that can affect virtually every organ system. Female is often related. The accurate etiology and pathogenesis are still unknown. Epidemiological evidence shows that the incidence of SLE has increased gradually. Though glucocorticoid and cyclophosphamide combination therapy can prevent the disease from advancing, it causes nonspecific immune suppression which leads to multiple organ damages and shortened lifespan. It is necessary to pursuit a controllable immunotherapy that selectively inhibits certain autoreactive lymphcyte clone, among which, therapeutic or prophylactic peptide vaccine is believed to be most prospective.It has been a long time to use specific antigens to induce immune tolerance. The method can highly selectively inhibit lymphcyte clones reactive to certain antigen, but has no influence on normal immune function. In early stages, progresses had been made in using complete antigens to induce immuno tolerance. The problems are it can irritate immune system and the antigens are difficult to obtain. Recent researches reveal that whether endogenous or exogenous antigens must be presented on the surface of APC as the pattern of peptide epitope-MHC complex by protease degradation of APC before they are recognized by T cell receptors and induce T and B cell activation. T cell immune tolerance may be easier to be induced because organ-specific and nonorgan-specific AID are mediated by T cells and low dose antigens are enough. Compared with complete or large molecular antigens, peptide vaccines are easier to induce immune tolerance, easy to synthesis, purification and more safe. So it has been the hot spot to use Th cell epitope of autoantigen instead of complete antigen to prepare therapeutic peptide-based vaccines.The screening and identification of the autoantigen epitope are important to peptide...