Treatment offers new hope for lupus – and maybe for other autoimmune diseases, too - Monash Lens

When real patients have unprecedented positive outcomes to a new treatment, it’s tempting to talk about it as “breakthrough” for medical science.

This describes the excitement around a new report from researchers in Germany of a radical new treatment for lupus.

The patients in the study – five people with severe lupus – went into remission following pioneering CAR T-cell treatment, which uses genetically altered cells.

MS is an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks nerve tissue.

Second, there’s variation between patients in which part of the immune system goes wrong.

A high-tech cell therapy used to treat cancer has been repurposed as a treatment for lupus, an autoimmune condition that can cause joint, kidney and heart damage.

In lupus, both parts of the immune system are involved, and both have been successfully used to develop medicines.

Building on a first-ever patient treated in this way by the same group a year ago, doctors in Germany created a “homemade” CAR-T treatment and used it in five patients with severe lupus.

Well, most centres aren’t able to make their own CAR-T treatments, so delivering this potential treatment will require a commercial approach.

One day we might even be able to extend such treatments to other autoimmune diseases, such as MS, where B cell-directed treatments have been helpful, as well as in lupus.

Importantly, short-term side-effects of CAR-T treatment (which include brain and bone marrow problems) can be severe.

For this reason, such a treatment would only be used for the most severe cases in which standard treatments have failed, like the patients in the German trial.

With all these advances, we can at last tell our patients, and our friends and family with lupus, that there’s light at the end of what’s been a very long tunnel.