{"id":29849,"date":"2025-06-18T09:00:38","date_gmt":"2025-06-18T09:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=29849"},"modified":"2025-06-18T09:28:08","modified_gmt":"2025-06-18T09:28:08","slug":"cutting-edge-cancer-therapy-offers-hope-for-patients-with-lupus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=29849","title":{"rendered":"Cutting-Edge Cancer Therapy Offers Hope for Patients With Lupus"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lupus can be debilitating and sometimes deadly for the 3 million people who have it. A treatment called CAR T appears to stop it in its tracks.<\/p>\n

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Jennifer Le\u2019s doctor ticked through a long checklist of head-to-toe symptoms as she examined Ms. Le in a Boston clinic last month. Was she experiencing brain fog? Headaches? What about hair loss, rashes or joint pain?<\/p>\n

Ms. Le, 36, was diagnosed with lupus in 2016, just after she got married. She tried all the standard treatments, hoping that her symptoms would stabilize and she could one day get pregnant. Pregnancy wasn\u2019t possible on the medications she needed to tamp down the inflammation causing her arthritis and anemia. And it was too dangerous to try for a baby with uncontrolled lupus, a chronic disease that causes the body to attack its own healthy tissue.<\/p>\n

By last fall, Ms. Le had run out of conventional treatment options. That\u2019s when Dr. Meghan Sise, her physician, offered her a chance to participate in a clinical trial that was testing a new therapy, borrowed from the field of cancer research.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s try it,\u201d Ms. Le told Dr. Sise, who is a principal investigator on the trial. \u201cI have nothing to lose.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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CAR T-cell therapy, a kind of \u201cliving drug\u201d that modifies patients\u2019 immune cells to help them attack misbehaving ones, has been used with significant success to treat some cancers, particularly of the blood. A growing body of evidence has suggested that the therapy can also treat a severe form of lupus that, at best, can be managed as a lifelong condition and, at worst, resists treatment and can lead to organ failure and death.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really promising, and honestly the first therapy that we\u2019ve talked about as a cure,\u201d said Dr. Lisa Sammaritano, a rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery \u2014 Weill Cornell Medicine and the lead author on a set of recently updated guidelines for lupus treatment<\/a>. Until now, she said, \u201cwe haven\u2019t had a cure \u2014 we\u2019ve had control.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Lupus can be debilitating and sometimes deadly for the 3 million people who have it. A treatment called CAR T appears to stop it in its tracks.Jennifer Le\u2019s doctor ticked through a long checklist of head-to-toe symptoms as she examined Ms. Le in a Boston clinic last month. Was she experiencing brain fog? Headaches? What about hair loss, rashes or joint pain?Ms. Le, 36, was diagnosed with lupus in 2016, just after she got married. She tried all the standard treatments, hoping that her symptoms would stabilize and she could one day get pregnant. Pregnancy wasn\u2019t possible on the medications she needed to tamp down the inflammation causing her arthritis and anemia. And it was too dangerous to try for a baby with uncontrolled lupus, a chronic disease that causes the body to attack its own healthy tissue.By last fall, Ms. Le had run out of conventional treatment options. That\u2019s when Dr. Meghan Sise, her physician, offered her a chance to participate in a clinical trial that was testing a new therapy, borrowed from the field of cancer research.\u201cLet\u2019s try it,\u201d Ms. Le told Dr. Sise, who is a principal investigator on the trial. \u201cI have nothing to lose.\u201dCAR T-cell therapy, a kind of \u201cliving drug\u201d that modifies patients\u2019 immune cells to help them attack misbehaving ones, has been used with significant success to treat some cancers, particularly of the blood. A growing body of evidence has suggested that the therapy can also treat a severe form of lupus that, at best, can be managed as a lifelong condition and, at worst, resists treatment and can lead to organ failure and death.\u201cIt\u2019s really promising, and honestly the first therapy that we\u2019ve talked about as a cure,\u201d said Dr. Lisa Sammaritano, a rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery \u2014 Weill Cornell Medicine and the lead author on a set of recently updated guidelines for lupus treatment. Until now, she said, \u201cwe haven\u2019t had a cure \u2014 we\u2019ve had control.\u201dWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29851,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29849"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29852,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29849\/revisions\/29852"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}