Back in 2014, Selena Gomez was diagnosed with lupus. The singer and actress has been public about getting chemotherapy to treat her condition, and her kidney transplant. The autoimmune disease causes the immune system to attack the body’s tissues and organs. Inflammation caused by lupus can affect joints, skin, kidneys, blood cells, the brain, heart and lungs. (Learn more about systemic lupus erythematosus, or SLE, here.)
Like many celebrities in a similar situation, Ms. Gomez is using her public platform to raise awareness of, and funds for, lupus research. With her extremely large social media following – close to 500 million at the time of writing – she has the ability to turn her personal misfortune into something that benefits others.
Ms. Gomez’s efforts to fundraise and educate the public about lupus has resulted in half a million dollars in donations to the Lupus Research Alliance (as of 2017). Kenneth Farber, President and CEO of Lupus Research Alliance, stated: “Selena has supported our organisation in many ways, donating a portion of tickets sales for her last concert tour to the Lupus Research Alliance and requesting donations to us on the occasion of her birthday, as well as yesterday’s [kidney transplant] announcement. Together her appeals have raised almost $500,000 for research funded by the Lupus Research Alliance.”
Eight years after her diagnosis, the spotlight is once again on Ms. Gomez and her chronic condition with the release of her documentary called My Mind and Me. It is described as follows: “After years in the limelight, Selena Gomez achieves unimaginable stardom. But just as she reaches a new peak, an unexpected turn pulls her into darkness.”
Since the trailer was released in October 2022, it has already had over 5 million views. The documentary started streaming in November. And something else happened in November that makes me think lupus is having its moment: Penn Medicine CAR T pioneer Carl June, MD, and Daniel Baker, a doctoral student in his lab, published a comment in Cell about highly promising early results from a German trial that used chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T therapy to treat five adult patients with lupus.
According to a paper published in Nature Medicine, the patients went into remission within three months of a small dose of a personalized anti-CD19 CAR T-cell immunotherapy. Once they were in remission, the patients were able to stop taking their lupus medication. All the patients remained in remission up to one year. The paper’s abstract reports that “Reappearing B cells were naïve and showed non-class-switched B cell receptors. CAR T cell treatment was well tolerated with only mild cytokine-release syndrome. These data suggest that CD19 CAR T cell transfer is feasible, tolerable and highly effective in SLE.”
Up until this point, CAR T therapies have been used to treat cancers. In fact, there are currently six FDA-approved CAR T-cell therapies in the U.S. to treat different types of cancers. Very exciting progress is being made in treating cancer patients and putting them into long-term remission. Blogger Sara Nolte provides a helpful explanation and overview of CAR T cells in Explaining the hype: CAR T cells.
In the Cell commentary, Dr. June says: “We’ve always known that in principle, CAR T therapies could have broad applications, and it’s very encouraging to see early evidence that this promise is now being realized.”
According to this University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine news release, “From the start of CAR T research, experts believed that T cells could be engineered to fight many conditions other than B cell cancers.” And, “Researchers say lupus is an obvious choice for CAR T therapy because it too is driven by B cells, and thus experimental CAR T therapies against it can employ existing anti-B-cell designs.”
Clinical trials involving more patients, and more follow-up with these patients will need to take place to confirm the results, but it appears that CAR T therapy may be a viable treatment for lupus.
You can watch the trailer to My Mind and Me below.
Stacey Johnson
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