Immune cell therapies like CAR-T continue to provide some nearly miraculous therapeutic power. In addition to handling solid tumors, it turns out CAR-T can also be used to treat autoimmune disorders like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and ulcerative colitis.
By engineering CAR-T cells to attack B-cells, the body’s factories for the autoantibodies that do the damage in an autoimmune disorder, you not only eliminates the direct source of the problem (the autoantibodies), you potentially trigger an “immune reset” which seems to durably eliminate the problem (see diagram)!
Medical researchers rarely throw the word “cure” around, but this Nature News article does so 4 times! We live in interesting times!
Thoughts
The results of the trial were “much better than we could imagine”, says Du, and might be due to CAR T cells triggering the total depletion of dysfunctional B cells that attack the body’s tissues. “The immune system had to reset not only B cells, but also the rest of the immune system,” he adds, potentially allowing new, healthy B cells to replace the dysfunctional cells.
‘They don’t have symptoms’: CAR-T therapies send autoimmune diseases into remission
Rachel Fieldhouse | Nature