Three patients in China were the first to be treated from autoimmune disorders from modified donor cells. One of the patients, whose name is Gong, said that days after being treated, he was able to move some of his body parts again and that he could feel more relaxed. After a year, the patient says that he is feeling good and back to work.
CAR-T cells have been shown that they are very useful in treating blood cancers and autoimmune disorders, which is why researchers have started to create CAR-T therapy from donated immune cells. If they are successful, it will allow for the pharmaceutical companies to increase production and reduce costs and production times. They will be able to treat over one hundred people with one donor’s cell.
The procedure usually starts with the T cells of the patient being taken out. They then add some CAR proteins which target B cells. It then gets reinserted into the body which then after a while, the modified T-cells take out the B cells, the T-cells disappear, and normal B cells appear again. The process for creating CAR-T cells from a donor is similar to the normal process. They take out the T cells from a donor and add CAR that recognize B cells, but then they use a gene editing tool in order to take out five genes in order to prevent having the patient cells to attack the donor cells, or the donor cells to attack the patients cells.
The trial for testing donor cells was led by Xu Huji, a rheumatologist at Naval Medical University in Shanghai. They were the first to release results of the autoimmune disease, which it was published in Cell. Even after 6 months, the conditions stayed in remission. Another two dozen people also received the donor cells treatment but also had a slightly modified product. Xu says that most of the results have been very positive.
Even though the results have been positive, Xu says that they still need more evaluation. Xu said that the trial was at a small size, and future studies with a bigger patient population are necessary for approving the safety and efficacy. Gao Fu, former director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said that the results show the potential of the therapy but need more investigation on larger trials.
RELATED STORIES:
- https://interestingengineering.com/science/china-autoimmune-disorder-donor-cell
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03209-4#:~:text=Healthy%20donor,donated%20immune%20cells%20is%20similar.
- https://www.criver.com/eureka/china-treats-3-patients-first-cell-therapy-using-donor-cells
- https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-10-06/First-therapy-using-donor-cells-puts-autoimmune-disorders-in-remission-1xtWIzxngUU/p.html
- https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202407/18/WS669873f8a31095c51c50eaf9.html
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