Helminth Therapy for Immune-Mediated Inflammatory Diseases: Current and Future Perspectives

Abstract

Wenjie Shi,1,* Ning Xu,1,* Xuelin Wang,1 Isabelle Vallée,2 Mingyuan Liu,1 Xiaolei Liu1 1Key Laboratory of Zoonosis Research, Ministry of Education, Institute of Zoonosis, College of Veterinary Medicine, Jilin University, Changchun, 130062, People’s Republic of China; 2UMR BIPAR, Anses, INRAE, Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire d’Alfort, Laboratoire de Santé Animale, Maisons-Alfort, France*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Xiaolei Liu; Mingyuan Liu, Tel [phone], Email [email protected]; [email protected]: Inflammatory bowel disease and allergic asthma, as typical immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs), are associated with immune imbalance caused by complex interactions among environmental, genetic and bacterial factors. The changing immune imbalance of IMIDs not only causes serious pathological damages but also increases the difficulty of treatment. Helminths or helminth-derived molecules have been increasingly employed to treat IMIDs due to their immunoregulatory ability. Since helminth infection is not an appropriate treatment direction due to the complex immunoregulation and safety concerns, one of the new therapies is to harness the immunoregulation induced by the identified helminth-derived molecules using immune indexes as a guide. This review discusses the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel disease and allergic asthma, and summarizes the therapeutic effect of helminths and the immunoregulatory mechanisms induced by helminth-derived molecules proposing therapeutic regimens.Keywords: inflammatory bowel disease, allergic asthma, immunoregulation, IMIDs, helminth therapy, helminth-derived molecules

Keywords

• inflammatory bowel disease
• allergic asthma
• immunoregulation
• imids
• helminth therapy
• helminth-derived molecules