Autoimmune disease is like a life sentence for countless patients. When the immune system, the body's defense force, attacks itself instead of external enemies, every remedy is useless. A 47-year-old woman in Germany suffered from three such autoimmune diseases and achieved a miracle: a complete cure using a living anticancer drug made from her own immune cells.
A team led by Professor Fabian Müller at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg hospital in Germany said on the 9th (local time) in the international journal Med that "a female patient with three autoimmune diseases is enjoying a healthy daily life without medication 14 months after a single cell therapy." The researchers said this is the world's first record of bringing a patient to a near-cure by entirely resetting the patient's immune system.
◇Recovery from a state of total paralysis of blood function
The patient's blood function had failed, leaving her bedridden and dependent on transfusions for more than 10 years. The cause lay in B cells, a type of immune cell. B cells produce antibodies that seek out and neutralize external invaders and call in other immune cells to destroy them. But defective B cells produced antibodies that attacked red blood cells, which carry oxygen in the blood, causing autoimmune hemolytic anemia (AIHA).
The "rebel" antibodies made by aberrant B cells also attacked platelets, which help blood clot, causing immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), and attacked certain lipid-binding proteins, triggering antiphospholipid syndrome (APS), which makes blood clots form easily. It was, literally, a dilemma in which severe anemia coexisted with the danger that blood would not clot well or would clot too much.
The patient had already tried nine treatments, all of which failed, and needed up to three bags of blood transfused each day. What saved this patient was CAR-T cells. Once infused, they proliferate in the body and keep killing cancer cells, earning the labels "living drug" and "serial killer" of cancer cells.
The effect of CAR-T therapy was dramatic. The patient, who had lived in bed, stood up on her own on day 7 after treatment. She was fine without transfusions. By day 25, hemoglobin levels—binding oxygen in red blood cells—returned to normal, and hemolysis, the destruction of red blood cells, disappeared completely. The researchers said the patient has remained symptom-free to this day, 14 months after treatment, without immunosuppressants or adjunct drugs.
◇Succeeded in resetting the immune system and normalizing B cells
CAR-T cells are T cells with chimeric antigen receptors (CARs). Like the chimera of Greek mythology, which combined features of several animals, genes that recognize antigen proteins on the surface of cancer cells are fused into immune T cells. Unlike other anticancer therapies, they spare normal tissue and attack only cancer cells, producing superior therapeutic effects.
The team engineered genes so that T cells from the patient's blood would find and attack CD19, a specific protein on the surface of antibody-producing B cells. In other words, CAR-T cells tracked down and wiped out the B cells that were producing the rebel antibodies. Rather than merely suppressing symptoms, this approach eliminates the root cause of the immune system failure.
The researchers explained that several months after CAR-T therapy, B cells also returned to normal. The newly formed B cells no longer attacked the patient's body. They said CAR-T therapy not only suppressed the immune rebels but also succeeded in resetting immunity to a normal state. There were almost no side effects.
In blood cancer treatment, CAR-T can trigger a "cytokine storm," an excessive inflammatory response as cancer cells die en masse. The researchers explained that in treating autoimmune diseases, such side effects are rare because CAR-T targets far fewer cells than in cancer.
The researchers believe the patient has a few mild residual symptoms, but these stem from prior drug treatments rather than CAR-T therapy. Reuben Benjamin of King's College London (KCL) said, "It's a truly fantastic result that despite being a very powerful therapy, there were almost no side effects and the patient was cured."
◇Hopes for treating other autoimmune diseases
CAR-T has already been approved as a treatment for several blood cancers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved seven CAR-T therapies, from Kymriah by Novartis of Switzerland in 2017 to Aucatzyl by Autolus of the United Kingdom in 2024. All are used to treat blood cancers in which immune cells that should protect the body have turned into cancer cells.
The problem is cost. CAR-T therapy requires harvesting a patient's cells and engineering them outside the body to proliferate, costing hundreds of millions of won per dose. But Müller said that considering the tens of thousands of pills the patient had taken, the repeated hospitalizations, and the fact that she can now return to social life, it is an economical treatment in the long run.
CAR-T therapy is generally used to treat blood cancers such as leukemia and remains experimental for autoimmune diseases. Shi Jun, deputy director of the Institute of Hematology and Blood Diseases at Peking Union Medical College in China, said, "To assert that CAR-T has cured autoimmune disease, we need long-term follow-up data on more patients."
Prospects, however, are bright. Carl June, a pioneer of CAR-T therapy and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, said, "Around 200 clinical trials for autoimmune diseases are underway worldwide," adding, "Within one to two years, approvals of CAR-T therapy for lupus, multiple sclerosis and systemic sclerosis, among other autoimmune diseases, will follow one after another."
References
Med (2026), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.medj.2026.101075