The role of autoimmunity to glutamate receptors in neurological disease.

Understanding and experimentally approaching the processes that underlie the origin and progression of many severe neurological disorders presents a challenge to both clinical and basic researchers. We have found that the origin of some neurological diseases, including a rare form of childhood epilepsy and a neurodegenerative disease associated with peripheral cancers, may be related to production of physiologically active autoantibodies that are directed towards excitatory ionotropic glutamate receptors of the brain. This suggests that some neurological diseases may result from dysfunction of the immune system.