The first patient had numerous manifestations of SLE and had previously failed several medications.
“This patient is now over 600 days out. No disease activity in the interim. And is not on any other immunosuppression,” Dr. Kim said.
Peter Merkel, MD, chief of rheumatology at the University of Pennsylvania, said there “a long way to go, but this is very exciting.”
Chimeric Autoantigen T Cell Receptor Therapy
Dr. Kuhn said there is also a lot of excitement around findings showing the possibility of selectively targeting autoreactive B cells with chimeric autoantigen T cell receptor therapy.8
“You could potentially engineer a T cell receptor with an autoantigen that then could selectively deplete those B cells making autoreactive antibodies,” she said. This approach would be limited in diseases where it isn’t known what the autoantigen is, she said, but “it’s that proof of concept that this could be a way to really selectively get at the bad B cells and leave your good B cells behind.”
Thomas R. Collins is a freelance medical writer based in Florida.
References
- Calabrese C, Kirchner E, Villa Forte A, et al. Early experience of breakthrough COVID-19 infections in patients who received pre-exposure prophylaxis with tixagevimab/cilgavimab [abstract]. Arthritis Rheumatol. 2022;74(suppl 9).
- Connolly C, Wallwork R, Chiang TPY, et al. Three dose SARS-CoV-2 vaccination is associated with reduced risk of breakthrough COVID-19 during omicron wave in patients with autoimmune diseases [abstract]. Arthritis Rheumatol. 2022;74(suppl 9).
- Dean KD, Striebich C, Feser M, et al. Hydroxychloroquine does not prevent the future development of rheumatoid arthritis in a population with baseline high levels of antibodies to citrullinated protein antigens and absence of inflammatory arthritis: Interim analysis of the StopRA trial [abstract]. Arthritis Rheumatol. 2022;74(suppl 9).
- Messier S, Beavers D, Queen K, et al. Effectiveness of intensive diet and exercise on knee pain among communities with knee osteoarthritis, overweight, and obesity: The WE-CAN pragmatic randomized clinical trial. Arthritis Rheumatol. 2022;74(suppl 9).
- Fava A, Buyon J, Mohan C, et al. Urine proteomics and single cell transcriptomics identify IL-16 as a biomarker for lupus nephritis [abstract]. Arthritis Rheumatol. 2020;72(suppl 10).
- Feehan LM, Lu N, Xie H, et al. Twenty-four hour activity and sleep profiles for adults living with arthritis: Habits matter. Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken). 2020 Dec;72(12):1678–1686.
- Schett G, Boltz, S, Muller F, et al. CAR T cell treatment of refractory systemic lupus erythematosus [abstract]. Arthritis Rheumatol. 2022;74(suppl 9).
- Mog B, Shaw ER, Hwang MS, et al. Chimeric autoantigen-T cell receptor (CATCR)-T cell therapies to selectively target autoreactive B cells. Arthritis Rheumatol. 2022;74(suppl 9).
