Cutting-Edge Cancer Therapy Offers Hope for Patients With Lupus

Well|A Cutting-Edge Cancer Therapy Offers Hope for Patients With Lupus

Jennifer Le’s 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’t 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’s 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.

“Let’s try it,” Ms. Le told Dr. Sise, who is a principal investigator on the trial. “I have nothing to lose.”

CAR T-cell therapy, a kind of “living drug” that modifies patients’ 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.

“It’s really promising, and honestly the first therapy that we’ve talked about as a cure,” said Dr. Lisa Sammaritano, a rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery — Weill Cornell Medicine and the lead author on a set of recently updated guidelines for lupus treatment. Until now, she said, “we haven’t had a cure — we’ve had control.”