The Most Exciting New Advancements in Managing and Treating Lupus

The case study involved just one patient: a 20-year-old woman with severe systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). But the study’s results were so dramatic that they appeared in 2021 in the New England Journal of Medicine.  The woman received a type of cell therapy called CAR-T, which in the past has been used primarily to treat cancer. CAR-T cell therapy involves altering a patient’s immune cells so that they identify and attack problems or pathogens. In people with cancer, that attack is aimed at the diseased cells. But in the NEJM case study, the therapy was directed at the woman’s own B cells, which are thought to be a primary cause of inflammation and damage in patients with lupus. The results were astonishing. “Within one month, nearly all of her symptoms had calmed down,” says Dr. Michelle Petri, a professor of medicine and director of the Johns Hopkins University Lupus Center, who was not involved with the case study. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Soon after that initial case study appeared, the same group of researchers showed that CAR-T therapy led to dramatic and lasting improvements in five additional patients with SLE. Even when the patients’ B cells returned, they did not initially display their old pattern of harmful activity. “They didn’t come back as bad lupus B cells,” Petri says.  While these early CAR-T results have created a lot of excitement, Petri notes that a lot ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news