Chinese cell therapy may treat asthma long term with a single jab: study

Chinese scientists say an immunotherapy treatment widely used in the fight against cancer has shown potential for non-cancer diseases, and a single shot can provide long-term protection against asthma.

Asthma, the most prevalent respiratory disease, affects more than 300 million people worldwide and causes more than 250,000 deaths a year.

Clinically, it is characterised by intermittent symptoms of coughing, wheezing, chest pain and shortness of breath because of airway obstruction. But no therapy can induce lasting remission with just one dose.

According to Peng Min and his colleagues, most of whom are from the School of Basic Medical Sciences at Tsinghua University, asthma in around half of patients is driven by a group of cytokines, including IL-4, IL-5 and IL-13.

Cytokines are signalling proteins that help control inflammation in the body, but too many cytokines can lead to excessive inflammation and conditions such as autoimmune diseases. Currently, biological medical products that target these proteins are approved to treat severe asthma, but they require lifelong dosing.

In their latest study, Peng’s team developed a new way to target this group of cytokines simultaneously with a cell treatment called CAR-T.

CAR-T, which stands for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, works by genetically engineering a patient’s own killer T-cells – a type of white blood cell critical for fighting infection – to recognise and destroy enemies, such as cancer cells. This new form of immunotherapy has successfully treated some blood cancers.

They found that a single infusion of the engineered cells, without any pre-treatment, was enough in mice to provide sustained suppression of lung inflammation and relieve asthma symptoms for more than a year.

The results were published on Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Immunology.

The new cell therapy represents an option for asthma patients “to achieve long-term remission of symptoms and live a normal life with a single administration of cells”, the team said.

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In addition to asthma, they said that other diseases caused by the same factors – such as allergies, atopic dermatitis or obstructive pulmonary disease – could potentially be treated with this cell therapy.

In a “News and Views” article published in the same issue of the journal, Bart Lambrecht, a medical expert from Ghent University in Belgium, and his colleague warned that more work was needed on the feasibility and safety of such an approach before the modified cells could be used in the clinic.

One important consideration, they pointed out, was patient selection. The biomarkers or clinical characteristics that would predict superiority of the new CAR-T cell therapy over existing biological medical products “remains to be studied”, they said.