Once a month, Talaya Reid wakes up early to board a flight from Philadelphia to Boston, in hopes of impacting research into lupus and the potential benefits of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy to treat the chronic autoimmune disease.
Reid travels to UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester to participate in an individualized clinical research study exploring the use of CAR T cell treatment in lupus nephritis for severe or nonresponsive lupus. The Lupus Center at UMass Chan is one of five national sites participating in the trial sponsored by Kyverna Therapeutics. Reid is one of a dozen patients in the United States to have undergone CAR T cell treatment for lupus.
“I’ve participated in treatments before that have calmed my lupus symptoms down, but the symptoms were still there, or the treatments did nothing at all. When I heard it was possible to live without lupus symptoms or flare ups anymore, I was very interested in participating in this trial,” Reid said.
Roberto Caricchio, MD, the Myles J. McDonough Chair in Rheumatology, professor of medicine, chief of the Division of Rheumatology in the Department of Medicine and director of the Lupus Center at UMass Chan, is principal investigator of the CAR T cell therapy trial in lupus at UMass Chan.
“This treatment is not for everyone. It is for those patients who unfortunately have gone through several treatments that we have available and somehow the lupus does not seem to be matched by them. It’s a significant, but restricted group of patients. And within that group of patients, it takes a special individual who is looking for something different and commits to something new,” Dr. Caricchio said.
Lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease that involves multiple organ systems and often requires lifelong treatment with immunosuppressive or immunomodulatory drugs, which are not effective for all patients. Lupus nephritis is a complication of lupus that causes inflammation of the kidneys, impacting the body’s ability to remove waste from the blood or regulate body fluids.
