Less toxic therapies on the horizon.

• Position: Autoimmune Diseases

Autoimmune diseases--which include lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, myasthenia gravis, Grave's disease, and small vessel vasculitis--are caused when antibodies produced by an individual's immune system mistakenly are directed to attack the body's own tissues. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers, however, have discovered that patients with autoimmune disease harbor antibodies reactive to a normal "self" protein (the autoantigen of this disease), as well as to its mirror image protein. In other words, parallel to the existence of the normal "self" proteins are the proteins complementary to "self" proteins.

Ronald Falk, Thurston Professor of Medicine and chief of the School of Medicine's Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, likens the research team's observations and eventual findings to the work of M.C. Escher, a well-known graphic artist whose drawings incorporate optical illusions and unconventional patterns that may elude the viewer's eye at first glance. "In an Escher drawing, the eye focuses on one image, but there is a parallel image that interconnects with the dominant image. [The University of North Carolina] proposes that in autoimmunity, the parallel image has been overlooked in the past, and may be, in fact, the culprit and trigger for autoimmunity."

That discovery led the...