Engineered erythrocytes covalently linked to antigenic peptides can protect against autoimmune disease

Significance Immune-mediated diseases are prevalent, debilitating, and costly. Unfortunately, current treatments rely on nonspecific immunosuppression, which also shuts down a protective immune response. To circumvent this, we exploited the noninflammatory natural means of clearance of red blood cells (RBCs), in combination with sortase-mediated RBC surface modification to display disease-associated autoantigens as RBCs’ own antigens. We found...