I've worked in lupus research and one of the things rheumatologists have told me is they see it frequently triggered by the most stressful events in people's lives. So a divorce, eviction, moving, death of a parent or child.
Fortunately great steps have been taken with diagnosis and awareness (it used to not only be hard to find but very stigmatized, lumped in with psycho-somatic disorders like fibromyalgia, long COVID and chronic lyme).
I'm not saying Car-T doesn't work for certain diseases, more that it's too complex and too expensive to operationalize and unsustainable to bring to mass-market. It may prove successful as a one-off for individual rich single-payer patients but cell therapy companies fail left and right because they repeatedly can't operationalize the treatment into a sustainable business model. It has promising data and potential for transformational results, sure just too many challenges exist thus far for anyone to demonstrate durability bringing an actual treatment to market without major technological and economic advancements. The infrastructure & manufacturing is too intense, it's just not a scalable business.
randycupertino•2mo ago
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/stress-trauma-lupus/
Fortunately great steps have been taken with diagnosis and awareness (it used to not only be hard to find but very stigmatized, lumped in with psycho-somatic disorders like fibromyalgia, long COVID and chronic lyme).
Personally I think the T-cell immune balance research is promising: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lra-awards-2025-lup...
as well as PARP inhibitors for precision medicine https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05966480
Car-T for lupus thus far has been a nothingburger (Cabaletta Bio, Nkarta, Kyverna, etc).
eaurouge•2mo ago
https://lupus.bmj.com/content/11/Suppl_1/A109
randycupertino•2mo ago