“A lupus diagnosis turned German teenager Janina Paech’s life on its head. Once a keen horse rider and an aspiring doctor, Paech’s heart, liver and kidneys were failing by the time she turned 21.

Running out of hope, her father Stefan reached out to Professor Georg Schett, a doctor on the other side of Germany, who was testing a cell-based gene therapy approved to treat blood cancer patients on lupus sufferers.

Paech became just the third patient to receive Car-T, or chimeric antigen receptor cell therapy, as a treatment for an autoimmune disease such as lupus, which is caused by the immune system attacking healthy cells. Within days of receiving the infusion, the crippling fatigue and joint pain that had blighted Paech’s early adulthood had dissipated. Three years later, she is still in remission…

The early findings offer hope to millions of autoimmune disease patients — four in every five of whom are women, probably due to genetic abnormalities associated with the X chromosome — who do not respond to conventional steroid treatment and face the threat of multiple organ failure.”

From Financial Times.