Nanoparticles Stop Multiple Sclerosis In Mice

HangingChad writes "Scientists have used nanoparticles covered in proteins to trick the immune system to stop attacking myelin and halt the progression of multiple sclerosis in mice. The nanoparticles, about 200 times thinner than a human hair, are made from the same material as dissolving stitches. Scientists compare the process an immune system 'reboot'. The process keeps the immune system from treating myelin as an alien invader and to stop attacking it."

"Medical News Today" Unreliable

[guttentag]

The article in "Medical News Today" reads like the stuff I used to get from freshman journalism students, not like a professionally-written article. In the first paragraph the article claims managed to halt MS in mice, but then in the third paragraph she quotes one of the authors of the original article [nature.com] in Nature (behind a paywall so we can't read what it actually says unless someone here has a subscription or wants to pay $32). The second paragraph, which should be giving you more information about the subject of the article, throws so much titular crap at you it's hard to figure out who she's talking about, or what relation they have to the work that's being discussed:

Corresponding author Stephen Miller is the Judy Gugenheim Research Professor of Microbiology-Immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago in the US. He says in a statement:

It reads more like a transcript of a TV news segment. When you're watching TV they throw these titles at you before the person says anything to give them credibility, so you won't even notice that they never told you whether this guy actually had anything to do with the research. It doesn't work in print because people have the time to read it and realize she's not telling us key info.

The nanoparticles and Miller and colleagues used are made of a polymer called Poly(lactide-co-glycolide) (PLG), which...

The nanoparticles and Miller and colleagues? What? And why are random paragraphs in bold? As you scroll through the article there are four different paragraphs that are in bold for no apparent reason. Does she edit her work or just churn it out and post it?

Slashdot editors should start giving articles from Medical News Today more scrutiny. It seems like it's an office with about 5 people [medilexicon.org] who pay this Catharine Paddock PhD to summarize articles in paywalled journals to drive advertising dollars. The other employees are two CEOs, a marketing director and a "Web Manager." Their other businesses are a database of hospitals, a medical abbreviation glossary, and a medical site ad service. Paddock's PhD is in "Business Administration." Summarizing the paywalled articles to raise awareness is fine, but she seems to be their only author and she can't get her facts straight. If she's contradicting herself in the first three paragraphs and we can't read the source material to verify, then reading MNT articles does nothing but drive ad dollars for MNT. Wait for some more reputable source to sum up the paywalled article and link to that instead.

HolyGrail candidate...

[ElitistWhiner]

...this treatment's ability to selectively target specific immune intolerances and isolated reset-response within host immune systems promises a way forward to enable immune system regulation for a host of autoimmunity diseases, such as: Coeliac disease, diabetes mellitus type 1 (IDDM), Sarcoidosis, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), Sjögren's syndrome, Churg-Strauss Syndrome, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, Graves' disease, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, Addison's Disease, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and allergies.