BEIJING, May 28 (Xinhua) — A team of Chinese scientists have developed a promising therapy using genetically engineered immune cells, which has been shown to induce long-lasting remission of asthma in mice following a single injection.
Asthma, the most prevalent respiratory disease, affects about 300 million people and causes more than 250,000 deaths annually. Pharmaceutical innovators are advancing the development of a long-acting therapy designed to provide patients with enduring symptom relief with a single administration of medication.
The study published on Monday in the journal Nature Immunology reported an encouraging animal experiment result, in which a single infusion of genetically engineered immune cells in mice led to sustained repression of lung inflammation and alleviation of asthmatic symptoms, without any conditioning regimen.
Researchers from Tsinghua University engineered chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cells to target and eradicate eosinophils, a type of white blood cell that plays an important role in asthma patients.
CAR-T therapy has already been used in the cancer treatment. It tends to harvest immune cells called T cells from a patient’s blood and then genetically modify them in the lab to produce special structures called chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) on their surface.
The altered T cells are then reintroduced into the patient, where the cells’ new receptors enable them to recognize and latch onto cancer cells to neutralize them.
In the new study, the engineered cells have demonstrated sustained functionality for a minimum of one year, and can also prevent inflammation in the airways.
These data show that asthma might be pushed into long-term remission with a single dose of long-lived CAR T cells, but the potential therapy still requires further clinical trials to test its safety and efficacy in human patients, said the researchers.
