Stanford Medicine scientists tie lupus to a virus nearly all of us carry

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/11/lupus-epstein-barr.html

by XzetaU8 • 8 months ago

28 3 8 months ago

med.stanford.edu

I've worked in lupus research and one of the things rheumatologists have told me is they see it frequently triggered by the most stressful events in people's lives. So a divorce, eviction, moving, death of a parent or child.

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/stress-trauma-lupus/

Fortunately great steps have been taken with diagnosis and awareness (it used to not only be hard to find but very stigmatized, lumped in with psycho-somatic disorders like fibromyalgia, long COVID and chronic lyme).

Personally I think the T-cell immune balance research is promising: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lra-awards-2025-lup...

as well as PARP inhibitors for precision medicine https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05966480

Car-T for lupus thus far has been a nothingburger (Cabaletta Bio, Nkarta, Kyverna, etc).

eaurouge• 8 months ago

Kyverna claims to have achieved remission in clinical trials. Is that really a nothing burger?

https://lupus.bmj.com/content/11/Suppl_1/A109

randycupertino2• 8 months ago

I'm not saying Car-T doesn't work for certain diseases, more that it's too complex and too expensive to operationalize and unsustainable to bring to mass-market. It may prove successful as a one-off for individual rich single-payer patients but cell therapy companies fail left and right because they repeatedly can't operationalize the treatment into a sustainable business model. It has promising data and potential for transformational results, sure just too many challenges exist thus far for anyone to demonstrate durability bringing an actual treatment to market without major technological and economic advancements. The infrastructure & manufacturing is too intense, it's just not a scalable business.

Stanford Medicine scientists tie lupus to a virus nearly all of us carry

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