When it comes to CAR-T cell therapy, everyone’s first impression must be that it has made outstanding progress in tumor treatment. However, in recent years, scientists have tried to expand their application scope - using CAR-T for the treatment of systemic lupus erythematosus is an example.
cell therapy helps severe patients stop taking medication
In mid-September 2022, a new paper published in "Nature Medicine" (Nature Medicine) reported that scientists have successfully used CAR-T therapy to significantly alleviate the symptoms of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus and are expected to continue to overcome more autoimmune diseases .
author team is a group of medical experts from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. They recruited 5 severely ill patients with lupus erythematosus - 4 women and 1 male, aged between 18 and 24 years old, and carried out CAR-T cell therapy: they were first collected and isolated from their blood, then modified them with genetically modified technology, and finally injected back into the patient's body.
subsequent blood tests showed that the B cell of the five patients returned to normal after about 4 months of treatment and no longer produced abnormal antibodies; the patient remained disease-free and had stopped taking lupus erythematosus drugs for 3 to 17 months.
These five people have also become the first batch of autoimmune patients to receive genetically modified cells and achieve therapeutic effects. Georg Schett, a rheumatologist who led the study, said he speculated that CAR-T therapy led the "rebooting of the immune system."
We are very excited about these results. Several other autoimmune diseases that cause autoantibodies caused by B cell abnormalities, including rheumatoid arthritis, myositis and systemic sclerosis, may also be alleviated by CAR-T cell therapy; in addition, diseases such as multiple sclerosis may also be highly sensitive to this therapy.
injects T cells, thus making B cells normal
Generally speaking, the direct cause of lupus erythematosus is that the body's immune system is wrongly attacking healthy tissues and organs; however, there is no accurate explanation for its deep mechanism. Many scholars judge that it may be triggered by viral infections, specific drugs, and physical changes around the age of puberty and menopause.
data shows that about one patient with lupus erythematosus appears in about every thousand people, among which women (especially women of childbearing age) have a much higher risk of onset than men. Lupus erythematosus is difficult to diagnose because its symptoms often appear suddenly and quickly relieve, overlapping with the symptoms of several other diseases.
Lupus erythematosus can cause extreme fatigue, organ damage, and joint and muscle pain, one of the most common symptoms is a significant rash on the nose and cheeks. (Although for many people, the symptoms are mild.)
Given that other therapies are difficult to improve symptoms in severe patients, the Shetter team began to try CAR-T therapy. The full name of
CAR-T therapy is "chimeric antigen receptor T cell immunotherapy". It is a new targeted therapy for tumors. Since it was first applied to leukemia in 2015, it has achieved quite gratifying clinical results.
As mentioned earlier, the basic method of CAR-T treatment is to collect patient T cells, modify them to target new targets (such as cancer cells), and finally inject them back into the patient.
In the latest research, Shett et al. modified T cells of patients with lupus erythematosus to have the ability to target B cells so that they can attack abnormal B cells in the patient's body after infusion. B cells in patients with lupus erythematosus can produce a large number of autoantibodies. These antibodies are not to protect the body from pathogen invasion, but to attack healthy tissues.
To ensure that the new treatment does not damage the patient's immune system and does not put them at greater risk of infection, the Shett team evaluated the patient's response to a variety of vaccines before and after treatment, including measles , rubella , mumps , hepatitis B, tetanus and diphtheria vaccine.
results showed that there was no significant difference in the immune responses before and after treatment in the five lupus patients, indicating that CAR-T was mainly targeted at abnormal cells that made their own antibodies.
Source:
Scientists hail autoimmune disease therapy breakthrough
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