This is the question that launches a career in immunology.
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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Should at least get you a Phd
This seems like a question that you might ask in an askscience or science community.
true, but i feel like it's a stupid question, and the people would just say "that's a dumb question and you should feel bad for asking it".
That may well be true, but in my experience every single scientist asks stupid questions every day. The difference between them and politicians is that they write it down and pursue answers relentlessly, while politicians do neither.
In other words, don't be afraid of silly questions, everyone is in the same boat.
I appreciate your kind words, internet stranger.
Friend, there is only one kind of dumb question: those that are statements with a question marks at the end of are simply a vehicle to place a statement.
And even those are fine by me if the asking being realizes this within the discussion. ("Why are we allowing women to vote if they are that much dumber than men?" is a stupid question in my book - and even that can lead to "oh wow I always just assumed that to be true but (data/argument) made me realize that I was wrong!". Rare but can happen....)
This is exactly what happens to me when I ask questions in more academic communities. My advice to you is to keep asking anyway. The world has legions of people who need to feel big by making other people feel small. Don't ever let that get in the way of asking things you want to ask or doing things you want to do.
I think this is a great question. Even if there is a misunderstanding hidden in there somewhere it looks like the kind of question that could produce very informative and interesting answers from someone with knowledge in the field.
man who gives a fuck what other people have to say about it, I vote indulge your curiosity anyway and fuck the haters
"The only stupid question is the one that isn't asked."
I'm no expert, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, but I found this study indicating among a samples of people with rheumatoid arthritis, having a previous measles infection was actually overrepresented.
I also found this discussion indicating scientists are already studying immunotherapy methods that may give you the effect of an immune system reset but in a safe and targeted way. The measles virus itself likely just has too many potential short- and long-term effects to be worth the risk, but that doesn't mean studying how it works won't be useful!
Thanks for links. As someone recently diagnosed with RA, I’m still trying to absorb as much information on it as possible.
What’s interesting about the study is it focused on RA patients without positive rheumatoid factor (RF) blood work. Now, in my skimming I didn’t see it mention anti-CCP, which is the more definitive test for RA. Despite the name, positive RF alone could be any number of things that aren’t RA. They didn’t mention if they were totally seronegative, though.
I have an unsubstantiated theory that seronegative and seropositive RA may be distinct diseases, but we don’t know enough yet and we treat them the same, so they get the same name. If the pts in this study were totally seronegative, that could correlate to my theory where maybe “seronegative RA” is actually more of a long-term infection triggered by measles. But these are just idle musings.
As a side note, the name rheumatoid arthritis is pretty silly from an etymological standpoint. The words basically break down as:
- rheumatism means inflammation
- -oid means like a thing
- arth- comes from joints
- -itis means inflammation
So put together, it’s “inflammatory-like joint inflammation.”
last time i asked this question i was called an idiot just for asking (and it was no stupid questions), so i'm not chiming in
to be fair, it does sound like a very stupid question.
i mean, do we really understand the mechanism by which measles does the reset all that well? that's my first question, but you know.
I think this is the primary question before anything else. Can you reliably replicate the immune system reset across multiple test subjects without/while limiting adverse consequences (e.g., completely destroying someone's immune system permanently)?
yeah it's one of those experiments that is ethically difficult to set up without an ongoing outbreak. intentionally exposing test subjects to measles sounds like an IRB nightmare.
so like hey if you work on a phd in this, let me know please i'm really curious
Edit: moved comment to top level
Probably not a good idea, since measles tends to increase risk of something going wrong in the immune system thus triggering autoimmune diseases.
We have drugs that do similar things to measles in the specific sense of wiping out “immune memory” but often in a more targeted, more controlled, and less “random” manner than measles. Like Rituximab or Daratumab that deplete memory B-cells in different ways. They are effective for some subsets of autimmune diseases.
For example Rituximab is the gold standard treatment for Rhematoid Arthritis (RA).
Did you watch 'I am Legend'? This is exactly what starts the apocalypse lol
Side note, book was waaaayyyyy better
Not an expert but I am a patient.
Immune system reset is already a type of therapy for MS. Lemtrada and Mavenclad are two brand name drugs that work on this principle. You don't take them for life. That's good because they make you very ill, but after 2 rounds of treatment you can go years without needing any further therapy.
Could the measles virus work better than these drugs? Maybe, but all the reasons at the top of the comments present challenges.
Problem with this and just about anything related to the human body (and a million other subjects) is that the answer usually is: it's not that simple.
The human body is extremely complicated with countless different proteins and system each performing multiple tasks all mixed throughput your body and with all of our knowledge we probably still only know a fraction of what there is to know.
Typically if someone comes up with "this one simple trick", the answer is "it's not that simple" and if someone sells you a simple solution (zinc! Ivermectin!) it's bullshit
In this particular case, (and I'm extremely much spitballing here, it's all bullshit that I'm saying) maybe you could use a virus like measles, use CRISPR to change it in such a way that it will deposit some of its DNA in your immune system to detect and kill the the immune cells that are attacking your insulin generating cells... Again, I'm full of shit here so don't take this with a grain of salt, don't take it at all because ITS NOT THST SIMPLE
Aside from some comments mentioning how immune reset therapies are in fact a thing through either antibody or chemical depletion of your immune cells. These can show improvement but it is very far from curative and not too much better chances than existing immune suppression stuff.
The danger to an immune "reset" are that you are generally then able to be reinfected with every cold and flu as well. This is dangerous for older or already fragile people. The existing therapies reduce this danger by not entirely wiping memory cells out but that also means they aren't always curative.
Beyond that autoimmune diseases in general are a mix of genetics and environmental factors (and even gut bacteria by some studies). If the underlying problem isn't fixed then relapse is a question of when not if. It's like adding fluid to a container with a leak, eventually you're going to have to add more again unless you fix the leak first.
So we have to find where the "leaks" are, what they are caused by and fix the cause(s) to have something that is an actual cure. Right now we mostly know where the leaks are and some causes and can patch some up leaks up. However, we don't have a way to fix the causes yet and we dont know all of them.
*I am a cell bio PhD but not an immunology specialist.
Without understanding the root cause of why the immune system became misinformed in the first place, and without knowing whether that cause still exists or has even become worse, you're playing a very dangerous game telling it to forget everything it knows and just blindly hoping it will make better choices the next time around, treating it as if it were just a random outcome and gambling with people's health. Imagine trying to treat someone with arthritis and after treatment their autoimmune situation gets even worse and they become diagnosed with MS, so you treat it the same way again and it becomes a very aggressive form of MS. That violates the hippocratic oath to do no harm, which is why there really isn't much interest in such approaches unless they've been proven reliable and safe in carefully controlled studies, which your proposal hasn't been (and presumably wouldn't be able to be).
Because it is a LOT more complicated than that.
Not all rheumatological diseases are due to the immune system's memory. As a case in point, Ankylosing Spondylitis is theorized as being caused by a mis-folded HLA-B27 protein response. The mis-folded protein response is caused by cellular stress, at least that is the theory. The lead singer of Imagine Dragon Dan Reynolds suffers from this disease. So there are people out there suffering from it, it's not just some disease out in left field no one has heard of before.
Are there diseases that could be treated by clearing the immune system's memory? Possibly, but there would also be consequences for that as well. Mainly, because the actual method by which the memory works is not completely understood.
Disclaimer: My wife is a Rheumatologist that does both basic research and clinical work. What I wrote above is based on what I have gleaned from her over the years. Any mistakes or misconceptions are strictly mine. I'm just an old IT guy and have never studied medicine.
not an immunologist; i don't want to undersell this to you: immunology is fantastically complex subject with many redundancies, feedback loops, and frustrating number of moving parts, many of which are still unknown in sufficient detail. that said, if you want any chance for it to go: first you'd have to figure out what exactly mealses virus does, then you'd have to find a disease that can be cured or treated by obliterating whatever mealses virus is obliterating, and then if there's any match (big if) it'll probably still won't work just with wild type virus and require significant modifications. and even then, that effect as is known in mealses today is not very reliable and lasts only months to years. and even then, there might be other approaches that are safer or more reliable or both
maybe in the course of figuring the first one there will show up an option to modify mealses virus in some significant way that might allow it to target something else, and maybe target other kind of disease, because in no way it'd be a blanket cure for all immune diseases ever. maybe someone made an observational study already that tracked how prevalence of some immune diseases changes after mealses infection, but many of these are rare diseases and it'd be massively hard endeavor
This sounds like the kind of thought an antivaxer would have to justify why they don't actually need vaccines. They are just resetting their immune system with this one simple hack called "being infected".
This is actually being done with immune reset gene therapy though I'm not sure if it's at all based on how the measles virus works. It's also a potential cure for Crohn's, Type 1 Diabetes, and many other ailments. A similar technique could also allow organ transplants without immunosuppressants through teaching the immune system to recognize the organ as part of the body.
I am closely following this one as someone with multiple auto immune diseases AND an organ transplant. This kind of thing would greatly improve my quality of life.