Current Studies of Therapeutic Vaccines for Rheumatoid Arthritis: Mechanism and Efficiency in Clinical Trials

Abstract

Rheumatoid Arthritis is an autoimmune disease with systemic inflammation chronically progressing, resulting in functional impairment, disability, and premature mortality. While treatments for RA have developed rapidly in recent decades and more types of drugs have been made, current mainstream treatments only focus on easing the symptoms, inhibiting inflammation, or delaying disease progression without antigen specificity. Therapeutic vaccines for RA, however, come as a new promising RA therapy, as they focus on the upstream of disease presentation, which is antigen-specific disease-driving cells, to modulate antigen-specific autoimmune responses without hurting those against foreign antigens. This article overviews a range of RA therapeutic vaccines under current development, introducing their basic principle, experiment design, results, and limitations. It also provides prospects for RA therapeutic vaccines.