Derek Lowe on this use of CAR-T: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/car-t-autoimmune-d...

And on the apparent long term risks of CAR-T: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/downside-car-t-the...

For the sake of my question let’s assume this is legit and magically works for a wide range of autoimmune conditions. How many years away are we from being able to sign up for this treatment? 10 years? 20? 30?

It would be nice to dream of it happening sometime soon.

All of these amazing therapies coming out of applied biology are based on years and years of basic science that has been done in universities across the world. Much of it funded by the US NIH. Unfortunately funding for basic science is very hard to come by.

Imagine if the billions of dollars being blown on boiling the oceans for a slightly better autocorrect were being used on basic and applied biological research instead. I have no doubt many afflictions would be a thing of the past (at least for those who embrace science instead of superstition).

That sounded almost too good to be true, especially with autoimmune stuff which seems even trickier to tackle than many cancers. One hell of achievement if it pans out long term.

Does this new donor-cell therapy potentially include the top-10 autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus (checked), and/or Hashimoto's thyroiditis?

In the future a pill with donor cells will be prescribed 1x a day for 3 days.

While the promise is great, let's be real. All of these personalised therapies get loads of funding because they almost inherently will be very expensive since they cannot scale, meaning drug manufactures supplying these can make a killing even compared to already expensive but more commonly used therapies. I guess this is more a comment on car-t usage in oncology and if this leads to seriously improved health outxomes, then of course, all the power to them.

Edit: i was mistaken, see below.