Psoriasis, a Systemic Disease Beyond the Skin, as Evidenced by Psoriatic Arthritis and Many Comorbities – Clinical Remission with a Leishmania Amastigotes Vaccine, a Serendipity Finding

Clinical and Immunological Analysis of Cutaneous Leishmaniasis before and after Different Treatments

“…Overexpression of wild-type prohibitin increases infectivity in parasites [31]. VT vaccine does not have prohibitin since amastigotes were extracted with NP-40 and supernatant discarded; thus no antibodies or cellular immunity to surface proteins could be found [17–20]. …”

“…Amastigotes were cultured in O'Daly's liquid culture medium without mammalian cells present [21]. First generation polyvalent antigens and second generation monovalent antigens (La, Lv, Lb, and Lch) vaccines were prepared as published [15–20]. The final first generation polyvalent immunogen contained 1 mg/mL or 250  μ g of each leishmania specie antigens in PBS supplemented with Rehydragel and 4  μ g/mL of gentamicin.…”

“…Antileishmania antibodies to amastigotes in sera from volunteers were performed before and after treatments, as published [17, 19, 20, 23]. The antigens were derived from amastigotes of the four leishmania species that constitute VT drug substance, tested as polyvalent extracts, and separately not pooled, as found in the VT drug product (La, Lv, Lb, and Lch).…”

“…50  μ g in 10  μ L of each leishmania specie was electrophoresed in invitrogen 4–20% NuPAGE Tris-acetate SDS-PAGE precast gels under reducing conditions with Tris-glycine SDS running buffer in a XCell SureLock Mini-Cell (Invitrogen life technologies) as published [17, 19, 20, 23]. Afterwards transfer to nitrocellulose paper (Schleicher & Schull, Keene, NH, USA) was performed in a Mini-trans-Blot (Biorad) following manufacturer's instructions.…”

“…Interestingly VT vaccine also induced clinical remission of psoriasis [15, 16], psoriatic arthritis [17, 18], and rheumatoid arthritis [19], a serendipity finding [20]. …”