Panel to Explain How Biomaterials Can Revolutionize the Development of Therapies for Autoimmune Diseases

Despite the explosion of disease-modifying drugs in the past 10 years, there’s still a large fraction of patients who experience incomplete disease control or no control at all. Even when these drugs work well, patients may experience autoimmune flares, which can lead to joint damage if they repeatedly occur. Further, the risk of cancer and opportunistic infections rises in people taking disease-modifying drugs.

During Delivering the Goods at Nanoscale: Novel Biomaterials as Therapies for Autoimmune Diseases, two experts will discuss how nanotechnology and biomaterials can revolutionize the development of new therapies for autoimmune diseases. This session will take place on Monday, Nov. 18, from 1–2 p.m. ET in Room 103AB of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. The session will be available on demand within 48 hours for registered ACR Convergence 2024 participants.

Nisarg Shah, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, will discuss drug delivery using biomaterials.

“What I’m going to be talking about is how my lab, in collaboration with Dr. Nunzio Bottini at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, has developed new types of biomaterials that reprogram immune cells, specifically T-cells and antigen-presenting cells, at the site of disease in order to enhance their immunoregulatory potential with the ultimate goal of facilitating resolution of disease,” Dr. Shah said.

As an example, Dr. Shah has developed biomaterials that sustain the local release of therapeutic payloads that enhance disease-protective immune cells, such as regulatory T-cells. Not only can these biomaterials suppress and reduce the disease burden in mouse models of autoimmune arthritis, but by simply injecting one joint, they may generate enough regulatory T-cells that can recirculate systemically and have a disease-specific, disease-modifying effect.

Rather than being generally immunosuppressive, these biomaterials are being developed with the goal of a disease-specific immunoregulatory effect that has the potential to last for a long period of time after they have completed delivering the therapeutic payload, essentially by generating disease-protected cells.

“What we’ve done in a different story is looked at immune cells known as dendritic cells. These cells are upstream of T-cells, and they typically are involved in the activation of T-cells. Using a new type of therapeutic approach, we can target dendritic cells that are localized to the inflamed joints, and by reprogramming these dendritic cells into ones that, rather than activating T-cells, facilitate the suppression of T-cell activation, we can have similar types of disease-modifying effects again without the related generalized immune suppression,” Dr. Shah said.

Pere Santamaria, MD, PhD, Professor of Microbiology, Immunology, and Infectious Diseases at the University of Calgary, Canada, will discuss developing nanomedicines for autoimmune disease.