Scientists are beginning to explore the use of designer cells in autoimmune disease treatment.
According to the National Cancer Institute, an autoimmune disease is “a condition in which the body’s immune system mistakes its own healthy tissues as foreign and attacks them.” These diseases often lead to high inflammation within the body, as well as symptoms like fevers, fatigue, aches and pains, swelling, skin rashes, digestive problems, and more.
As reported by LiveScience, a recent clinical trial used a form of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy to “reboot” the immune system of patients with autoimmune conditions. The publication noted that it’s too early to tell whether the treatment would work in the long term, but it did show some promising results in the short term, perhaps temporarily shutting down autoimmune processes.
Essentially, these “designer cells” eliminated both healthy B cells and B cells involved in autoimmune conditions. For context, B cells are usually the ones responsible for creating antibodies that attack the body’s healthy tissues.
Within three months after the trial, the body fully replenished its B cells—all of which were healthy this time, LiveScience reported.
“It’s like a reset button on a computer,” said study co-author Dr. Georg Schett, vice president of research and head of the Department of Internal Medicine at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, per LiveScience. “You just take everything away, you shut it down, and then it reboots in a normal way and it doesn’t have these [autoimmune] B cells anymore.”
Of course, if these results are the same in the long term, then the treatment could be a game-changer in autoimmune treatment.
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The post ‘Designer Cells’ Could Be the Key to Autoimmune Disease Treatment appeared first on VICE.
