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The presence of antibodies isn’t as big of a signal as we once thought.
There have been several companies developing antibody tests for various things, including your body’s own natural receptors. They have been appealing to people with chronic illnesses as an explanation for unexplained symptoms. For example, implying that if their tests show antibodies to certain receptors then that is a diagnostic clue.
Then some researchers started using one of the company’s tests with a control group (healthy volunteers) and discovered that healthy people had the same antibodies at the same rates as the sick people. They couldn’t differentiate between the sick group and the healthy group at all by the presence of antibodies.
So there’s a lot more to this than simply looking for antibodies to a substance. I don’t know enough about the topic to say exactly what that nuance might be, but after reading the research and talking to some experts in this field I don’t put much weight in simple binary analyses of antibodies.
There are two considerable points here:
1) this is a simple molecule, not an organism that can react to the threat. As you said, it would be interesting to be evaluate whether the antibodies actually have an effect, but they probably have, else they likely wouldn't have been detected at all.
2) the blood samples were taken from patients. It would be interesting to evaluate blood samples from the population at large.
To point (1), antibodies against non-alive substances are how you get things like allergies and autoimmune diseases. Your body goes "holy shit pollen!" and makes you break out in hives or "holy shit gluten!" and makes your guts inflamed.
Not all the time, obviously, and it depends on the type of antibody.
> As you said, it would be interesting to be evaluate whether the antibodies actually have an effect,
The article has a quote from the researchers about how the antibodies could remove a future PEG nanocarrier from the patients' system:
> "The antibodies formed against PEG attach themselves to the coated nanocarriers, thus counteracting the effect that is actually desired: the nanocarrier becomes visible to the immune system and is removed before it can exert its effect," explains Katharina Landfester, director of the department.
I don't know if there are other consequences outside of this. Having your body become good at removing a foreign substance doesn't sound like a bad thing, except in the case where you might want that foreign substance to help deliver a drug.
> Then some researchers
I'm not in any position to dispute the claimed facts but the way you phrased this hits many of the same beats as what we used to call an urban legend.
i guess they'll just have to use lalr(1)
more seriously, i wonder if something like this is a cause of the obesity pandemic: an unrecognized widespread immune response to a novel food additive provoking continuous low-level inflammation
though probably not peg itself; e1521 is not in that many foods, not like xanthan gum or nanoparticles of titanium dioxide
I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find.
Just speaking from personal experience, I’m fat because I eat cake and ice cream every day and walk 6,000 steps on a good day. I don’t really see a mystery here tbh.
Here’s an interesting Twitter thread with various explanations for the obesity pandemic [1].
[1] https://twitter.com/mold_time/status/1412827749828513800?s=2...
> i guess they'll just have to use lalr(1)
I see what you did there. :-) I myself was momentarily confused when I saw "PEG".
How would that explain the massive difference in obesity rates between countries?
how does continuous low-level inflammation cause obesity?
Or the widespread allergies
It doesn't look like obesity is infectious, so calling it a pandemic doesn't seem appropriate. The cure is eating less and exercising more. Many have done it.
> It has long been known that people can form defenses and thus antibodies against viruses. But antibodies can also develop against polyethylene glycol (PEG), a substance used in cosmetics, food and medicine.
People can develop antibodies against things which are not foreign micro-organisms. TIL.
(Obvious once you think about it. What you really develop antibodies to are proteins on the surface of micro-organisms)
Well, talk about a worldview-changing moment.
> People can develop antibodies against things which are not foreign micro-organisms. TIL.
Well yeah- that's how many (most?) resistance to toxins works. When you are given pit viper antivenom, it's literally a bunch of sheep antibodies that attach to the venom molecules and neutralize them and/or make them easier to get rid of.
You do the same thing for novel toxins as you develop a tolerance to them. Alcohol and peroxide have specific enzymes that are produced to break them down, but the immune system is responsible for a ton of stuff.
I am not an expert but I do know it's heinously complex- there are tons of different pathways that are activated by a combination of foreign substances and/or different types of cellular damage (not to mention location in the body). Anaphylactic allergies are controlled by different types of antibodies in different cells that react to different types of damage, normal allergies are a whole other thing, blood antibodies are yet another (multiple types!) of thing...
Biologists are amazing. It seems like picking diamonds off the beach. The book documenting the (public) operation of a new CPU is 10k+ pages long, but a single mammalian cell (taking up <<.001% of the area) makes that CPU look like a joke.
I don’t think the news here is that PEG can be targeted by antibodies (research companies have been manufacturing anti-PEG antibodies for decades), but that anti-PEG arises naturally (and frequently!) in the adaptive immune system.
Might be a good biomarker to adjust dosing and estimated pharmacokinetics of PEGylated drugs; it might make sense to take another look at PEG-based therapies that failed Phase II/III with this new finding in mind?
In other words, allergies.
PEG is not a protein. And you can definitely get antibodies against anything. There's an idiot researcher trying to get people to make antibodies against cocaine.
The bonkers thing about this is that adding PEG is supposed to be a strategy to get things to evade the immune system.
Isn't that what allergies are?
MiraLAX is basically just PEG, and is a laxative prescribed by doctors to people every day.
Nitpick it isn’t a laxative, it is a stool softener.
I wonder if the same also happens with Propylene glycol (PG)? Seems to be widely used in cosmetics as well but has a different molecular structure.
no
'glycol' just means an organic molecule with two hydroxyl groups
peg is a polymer of ethylene glycol (which monomer is, incidentally, deadly, while peg is generally considered nontoxic)
certainly some functional groups can be intrinsically toxic (organotin compounds come to mind) but you have hydroxyl groups on damn near every molecule in your body, including all the water molecules
PG is also the base for the liquid used in e-cigarettes
Footnote: PEG = polyethylene glycol in this context. So the study is related with people developing allergy to cosmetics and industrial products.
A interesting collateral effect is that Polyethylene Glycol is used to concentrate and catch viruses (adding common salt). Maybe it acts the same in the gutters and is seen as "a virus" by the immune system?
Just a thought
It's also in candy and medicine (and antifreeze and ...)
It's also the primary allergen contained within the MRNA COVID-19 vaccines AIUI.
PEG is in vape cartridges as a solvent. I’ve read the rationalization that “food grade” PEG is probably safe there because doctors use PEG to help with organ transplants, but missing from such a simple analysis is that you end up breathing PEG into your lungs with a vape pen, certainly different than anything studied thus far with organ transplants. Can’t be good, man. I mean, like all our other exposure to low-grade toxicity, it won’t kill you by itself, but I’m not interested in being a beta tester for inhaled PEG.
Anyway, maybe this is a more common route for PEG exposure besides Miralax.
PEG here is polyethylene glycol. It is used as a laxative agent and also as a bulking agent for making other medications. I wish it was deciphered right in the headline.
Huh, I take PEG in (large?) quantities before colonoscopies.
> colonoscopies
the plural makes me curious; for medical reasons?
Would this explain, or partially explain, why some drugs can such varying efficacy across different populations?
I would think that metabolism is a clearer target considering the direct link between genetics and enzymes, not to say that your proposal isn’t still possible this just seems more proximate. That being said I’m not an expert at all and could be totally wrong.
Apparently PEG is/was the one of the reasons of the severe allergic reactions in mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (Moderna, Pfizer)[0]
That's plastics for you folks...
[0]: [Translated from German](https://www-aerzteblatt-de.translate.goog/archiv/217236/COVI...)
Not a plastic and it is commonly found in food and cosmetics.
>evidence shows the existence of a detectable level of anti-PEG antibodies in approximately 72% of the population, never treated with PEGylated drugs, based on plasma samples from 1990 to 1999. Due to its ubiquity in a multitude of products and the large percentage of the population with antibodies to PEG, hypersensitive reactions to PEG are an increasing concern.[39][40] Allergy to PEG is usually discovered after a person has been diagnosed with an allergy to an increasing number of seemingly unrelated products, including processed foods, cosmetics, drugs, and other substances that contain PEG or were manufactured with PEG
PEG is not plastics...
You're forgetting about Aluminum
Fortunately, the Cootings machine did not develop any immunity against PEG-9.
No more Python parsing for those germans then...
Oh no! PEG grammars no! Oh my Python!
When I lived in Germany, I learned that one interesting, cultural aspect is that they don’t drink nearly as much tapwater as in America.
This means everyone buys water in plastic containers at the grocery store, all this plastic is PET-based, and PEG is always present in small quantities in that water (because water is slightly acidic, and acids disassociate the PET molecule).
The majority of Germans drinks tap water daily or almost daily: https://www.bwb.de/de/assets/downloads/twis-report.pdf
I think "everyone buys water in plastic containers" is a bit of an overestimate.
As a German I find that to be a pretty wild generalization, especially comparing it to the US where tap water quality varies massively (Oregon vs say Michigan (Flint...)). German tap water tends to be quite good. I live in Berlin, where tap water is excellent (albeit with a lot of minerals/calcium). The vast majority of people I know drink tap water, sometimes filtered, sometimes with CO2 added, but tap water nontheless.
And Germans tapwater tastes much better than US tapwater, there is no chlorine
I drink a lot of tapwater (though usually as tea)
I used to drink bottled water, because it is sparkly. I like sparkling water much more than ordinary water.
But I got tired of carrying so many bottles
I bought a CO2 device that should make tapwater sparkling. But lacked fuzz and my mother donated it away. She donates all my stuff
>This means everyone buys water in plastic containers at the grocery store, all this plastic is PET-based, and PEG is always present in small quantities in that water (because water is slightly acidic, and acids disassociate the PET molecule).
My mother only buys glass bottles because of that.
It's funny how impressions can differ, because my impression as a German visiting the US a couple times was that people there have an aversion towards drinking tap water.
That being said, the takeaway from this study shouldn't be that this is peculiar for the German population, it just happens that the Max Planck Institute for Polymers is located in Germany.
how the fuck do you get peg from ethylene terephthalate