Opening a new frontier in fighting autoimmune disease, researchers have successfully treated five lupus patients with a novel cell therapy that turns run-of-the-mill immune cells into specialized hunters of rogue cells helping fuel illness.
The patients treated with the new therapy all saw their severe symptoms, including kidney and other organ dysfunction, largely disappear.
The treatment, called chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy, involves isolating T cells—sentries of the immune system—from a patient’s blood and genetically modifying them to seek and destroy other cells that are causing disease. The engineered T cells are then reinfused into the patient. CAR-T therapy was first developed. In those conditions, the modified T cells target another type of immune cell, B cells, that have turned cancerous.
Then last year, a team led by Georg Schett, an immunologist and physician at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, reported inafter CAR-T therapy, without serious side effects. “This patient responded really well, safety was really good,” Schett says. “That pushed us to say, ‘This is a way to move forward.’”
“They really have a different life” now, Schett says. One is horseback riding; another, a disc jockey, “plays in the clubs again,” he notes. A third was able to return to school. Still, Schett cautions that he can’t yet say these young people are cured of their disease; it will take more time to assess whether that’s the case, as the risk of relapse remains.
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