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Autoantibodies from recovered Guillain-Barre syndrome patients exhibit altered effector functions that prevent subsequent neuron degeneration

Preprint Created on 05 Sep 2026 bioRxiv

Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) is an autoimmune polyneuropathy that is the leading cause of nonpoliovirus-associated acute flaccid paralysis worldwide. In most cases, GBS occurs following an infection, most commonly Campylobacter jejuni, through the induction of antibodies recognizing bacterial ganglioside-mimicking lipooligosaccharides that cross-react with human neuronal gangliosides. This post-infectious autoimmune cascade causes neuropathy, from which patients can recover as their anti-ganglioside antibody titers diminish and immunostimulation decreases. In this study, we find 10% of clinically confirmed GBS patients maintain high titers of circulating anti-ganglioside antibodies more than one decade after recovery. These antibodies no longer cause neuropathy compared to acute sera from the same patients using a human pluripotent stem cell-derived sensory neuron model with human complement. We found both IgG subclass and glycoform differences between paired acute and recovered GBS patient sera, including anti-inflammatory modifications on isolated anti-GM1 ganglioside antibodies. Together, these data suggest that patients with GBS select for non-pathogenic variants of autoantibodies that are no longer capable of damaging their neurons, but may still protect against C. jejuni infection.

Rogers, A. M., McAlpine, J. L., Yang, X., Jahan, I., Papri, N., Hayat, S., Archer-Hartmann, S. A., Shinn, M., Azadi, P., Zeltner, N., Islam, Z., Szymanski, C. M.

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