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5 people with lupus are in remission after CAR-T cell treatment
Science News [sciencenews.org] and the Guardian [theguardian.com] are reporting a story from Nature [nature.com]
Five patients are now in remission after a successful trial of a treatment for Lupus using CAR T cell therapy.
That treatment, called CAR-T cell therapy, seems to have reset the patients’ immune systems, sending their autoimmune disease into remission, researchers report September 15 in Nature Medicine. It’s not yet clear how long the relief will last or whether the therapy will work for all patients.
Even so, the results could be “revolutionary,” says immunologist Linrong Lu of the Shanghai Immune Therapy Institute at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.
CAR-T cell therapy has been used for various types of cancer, but it’s still in testing for autoimmune diseases [nih.gov]
In the new study, all five participants went into remission without needing additional drugs beyond the genetically engineered CAR-T cells. The target of those engineered cells — immune cells key for fighting off infections — returned a few months after being wiped out. Some of those cells are primed to attack viruses and bacteria but not the study participants’ healthy cells.
