Fascinating. Doctors have used chemotherapy to intentionally kill off the immune systems of patients with MS, an autoimmune disease:
Doctors report promising results using huge doses of a potent chemotherapy drug to treat autoimmune diseases including multiple sclerosis, though only a handful of patients have been treated so far and one MS researcher said far more study is needed before any victory is declared.
The drug, cyclophosphamide, is given at such high doses that it destroys most or all of a patient’s disease-fighting immune cells.
However, the stem cells within the patient’s bone marrow survive the drug’s onslaught, the doctors say, and then are stimulated with other drugs to rebuild the immune system from scratch — but without the bad triggers that caused the body to attack its own cells.