P2RX4 and autoimmune encephalitis: Indeed, purinergic antagonists have been found to be protective against cell death and degeneration [38,40,67,68,69,70], and the potentiation of P2X4R signaling by the allosteric modulator ivermectin favors a switch of microglia to an anti-inflammatory phenotype in a model of autoimmune encephalitis [58].