SAN DIEGO — When the first lupus patient received CAR-T therapy, researchers watched in amazement as her autoimmune disease rapidly went into remission. Then, they monitored her disease anxiously for months, wondering if it would return — especially as her immune B cells began recovering.
Now, two and a half years later, the researchers reported at the annual American Society of Hematology meeting that not only is this patient still in complete remission without the use of any immunosuppressive drugs, 14 other autoimmune patients treated with CAR-T are as well. Doctors treated eight of these patients for lupus, four for systemic sclerosis, and three for inflammatory myositis. While these results are early, experts said the data are invigorating an emerging field in autoimmune diseases.
“It looks very encouraging and suggests [CAR-T] could be used across other diseases where we thought B cells may not be as important such as scleroderma, which is not thought to be a disease driven by B lymphocytes or plasma cells,” said PJ Utz, a rheumatologist and immunologist at Stanford University who did not work on the study. Though, he added, questions remain. “The thing you look for when studying a new entity like this is – is it reproducible? When you look at a larger number of patients, does it remain safe? And does that efficacy remain for a longer period of time?”