Cell therapy helps woman with three deadly autoimmune diseases make ‘remarkable’ recovery
A woman who lived with three different life-threatening autoimmune diseases for more than a decade made a “remarkable” recovery following a type of cell therapy that resets her immune system.
The 47-year-old, who once required daily blood infusions and blood-thinning medications, tried nine different treatments before receiving cell therapy at Erlangen University Hospital in Germany last year.
The autoimmune diseases responded to treatment within weeks and, according to doctors, he was in remission without treatment for over a year, which “significantly improved his quality of life.”
“The treatment was extremely effective in eliminating three autoimmune disorders simultaneously,” said corresponding author Fabian Müller, from the University Hospital Erlangen in Germany.
He suffered from severe autoimmune hemolytic anemia (AIHA), a disease in which the immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys red blood cells.
He had also been diagnosed with two other autoimmune diseases with almost opposite symptoms. He had immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), a disease that causes his dysregulated immune system to destroy his platelets, increasing the risk of bleeding, and antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, a disease that increases the risk of dangerous blood clots in his veins.
But none of the treatments he tried had a lasting effect until he was offered CAR-T cell therapy, a type of “living medicine” that uses a patient’s own immune cells to attack harmful cells. It is used to treat many cancers, including leukemia, blood cancer, and lymphoma, cancer of the lymph nodes.
The team extracted the woman’s white blood cells and isolated T cells, which actively scan the body for infected or abnormal cells and destroy them. Doctors engineered the T cells to recognize a protein called CD19 found on B cells and reinfused them into the patient.
According to details, the therapy worked quickly to destroy rogue B cells published in the magazine Middle. The last blood transfusion was given just a week after treatment. After two weeks, she started feeling stronger, and three weeks after treatment ended, her hemoglobin level, a protein found in red blood cells, doubled and returned to normal. This showed that the immune system was no longer destroying red blood cells.
The therapy also improved other autoimmune conditions. Levels of antiphospholipid antibodies associated with dangerous blood clots gradually decreased and remained negative. Platelet counts also stabilized.
Although his white blood cell count was still low and his liver enzymes were slightly elevated, these may be related to years of previous treatments rather than CAR-T therapy, the team says.
“The speed and depth of the response was remarkable,” Dr Müller said. “We believe that using CAR-T therapy earlier in patients with severe autoimmune disease could help prevent complications from years of ineffective treatments.
“If we can intervene earlier, we can stop the disease process, prevent organ damage and give patients their lives back.”
