Millions of Americans living with autoimmune diseases may one day benefit from a breakthrough cancer therapy now being studied as a possible treatment option.<\/p>\n
About 8% of people in the United States live with an autoimmune disease, a condition in which the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy cells, tissues or organs. <\/p>\n
Many of these diseases are difficult to diagnose, have overlapping symptoms and lack a definitive test.Researchers estimate there may be between 80 and 150 autoimmune diseases, many of them chronic and debilitating, often requiring daily medication.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese can be pills, these could be infusions or injections,\u201d said Dr. Alicia Lieberman of Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. \u201cMost of which are targeted at dampening the immune response, and they are immunosuppressive to some degree. They have side effects to some degree.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lieberman is leading research into whether CAR T\u2011cell therapy, a cancer immunotherapy that genetically engineers a donor\u2019s or patient\u2019s own T\u2011cells to attack cancer, could be used to treat autoimmune diseases.<\/p>\n
While the research is still in early clinical trials, Lieberman says results so far are promising. \u201cPatients with severe lupus and lupus nephritis, scleroderma, even other neurologic conditions such as MS and stiff person syndrome, patients who have undergone this treatment have experienced significant improvement in their symptoms, if not reversal,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
Lieberman says the goal is a one\u2011time treatment that retrains the immune system.\u201cThis would be an immune reset,\u201d she said. \u201cThe hope is that people will not need treatments long\u2011term.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Millions of Americans living with autoimmune diseases may one day benefit from a breakthrough cancer therapy now being…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-216547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}