In many parts of the world, Vitiligo is still a great shame and stigma factor. Vitiligo is an autoimmune disease of the skin that causes disfiguring white spots, which can appear anywhere on the body. Vitiligo causes a great imbalance in the family where many are shunned from arranged marriages. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts have to say that the rejection is so crippling that one person suffering from the disease even requested an amputation of his forearm affected by vitiligo because he could marry with only one arm, but could not with vitiligo.
There is a great relief factor that nowadays scientists from the US have developed a treatment that may help permanently treat vitiligo within a few weeks. While existing treatments are effective but take at least 2 years to show the effect, the white spots reappear at the same location, often within just one year after stopping the treatments.
The research was first conducted in mice where the vitiligo cells were removed from the skin then treatment to re-pigment the skin would be long-lasting. Researchers tested the hypothesis on mice specifically engineered to develop vitiligo. They found that the vitiligo-causing memory cells require a special protein called “IL-15” to survive.
The vitiligo mice were injected with an antibody that blocks the IL-15 protein from interacting with the vitiligo cells. The treatment wiped out the memory cells from the mouse skin within just a few weeks, allowing the brown pigment to return in a spotty pattern. Just two weeks of antibody treatments caused repigmentation that lasted for months, unlike existing treatments, might provide long-term benefit for vitiligo patients. The team is now working to develop a clinical trial to test this antibody treatment in human patients.
