When you have rheumatoid arthritis (RA), you face more than sore and swollen joints. The autoimmune disease can affect your whole body, including your organs, and make you feel lousy all over. Fortunately, today’s drugs go a long way to help control the disease and its symptoms. They can, though, have serious side effects. In the future, an RA “vaccine” and other drugs that affect your immune system may be an option.

Research to develop this vaccine has been going on for years. Unlike those for other serious conditions, an RA vaccine wouldn’t prevent you from getting the disease. Instead, it would control RA in a different way than biologics or disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) like methotrexate.

An RA vaccine and other immune system drugs are likely years away from approval for use in humans. But several types are in clinical trials or earlier phases of research. So far, they show real promise.