A Cutting-Edge Cancer Therapy Offers Hope for Patients With Lupus
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.
By Nina Agrawal, The New York Times,
June 18, 2025
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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…
Of the estimated 3 million people with lupus worldwide, 90 percent are women…
Lupus causes the body’s B cells — white blood cells that produce antibodies — to go haywire. In CAR T-cell therapy, a patient’s own T cells, a type of immune cell, are extracted and engineered to wipe out disease-causing B cells. They’re then put back in the body, where they replicate, acting like “serial killers” that can clear out B cells even from deep within tissues that other drugs can’t reach…
The treatment is still prohibitively expensive, with one-time costs for approved cancer therapies approaching $500,000 or more… It will be years before doctors know for sure whether those results can last. In the meantime, patients say the treatment has given them an opportunity to live a normal life… [end quote]
In 1987, an Israeli immunologist, Dr. Zelig Eshhar from The Weizmann Institute of Science, created the world’s first “chimeric antigen receptor” (CAR). CAR-T therapy uses the power of a patient’s own immune system to attack destructive cells such as cancer and now lupus. Even though it’s expensive it substitutes for other expensive treatments that are debilitating and lifelong.
Several companies are involved in the development and commercialization of CAR-T cell therapies. Some key players include Novartis, Gilead (Kite), Bristol Myers Squibb, and Autolus Therapeutics. Additionally, CARsgen, Kyverna Therapeutics, Cabaletta Bio, and Verismo Therapeutics are also actively working in this field.
Novartis (NYSE:NVS), a global leader in integrated cancer solutions, achieved a world-first Kymriah became the first CAR-T cell therapy to be approved by the U.S. FDA.
I have invested in Novartis because I like its profile of high quality, low P/E ratio and good dividend.
I think CAR-T therapy will have many uses in the future. This is an exciting new therapy.
Wendy