Six people whose rheumatoid arthritis had defeated as many as eight previous drugs received a single infusion of a therapy built for blood cancer, and every one of them got better. Three of them stopped taking rheumatoid arthritis medication entirely and stayed off it through the end of follow-up.
That is the headline result from the first clinical trial to test CD19 CAR T-cell therapy in rheumatoid arthritis, run by researchers at Charité in Berlin and published in Nature Medicine. It is a real finding, and it deserves to be reported carefully, because six patients is six patients.
