When real patients have unprecedented positive outcomes to a new treatment, it’s tempting to talk about it as “breakthrough” for medical science. This describes the excitement around a new report from researchers in Germany of a radical new treatment for lupus.
The patients in the study – five people with severe lupus – went into remission following pioneering CAR T-cell treatment, which uses genetically altered cells.
So what is lupus, why is this such big news, and what could it mean for other patients and diseases?