Ksenia Kuleshova for STAT

CAR-T therapy, in which a patient’s own T cells are engineered to recognize and wipe out disease-causing cells, has completely changed how some cancers are treated in recent years. But in 2021, German researcher Georg Schett and his team were able to use CAR-T therapy to seemingly eradicate a young woman’s lupus. The resulting case report didn’t receive much attention, but the next year, they achieved similar results with five more people. That’s when things began to change.Today, more than three dozen people with lupus and other intractable autoimmune diseases have been treated by the German team. It’s still unclear exactly how long the remission that patients experience will last. Are they really cured, or could their disease resurge?  “Sometimes I even forget I had lupus,” said Janina Paech, one of the first lupus patients to receive the treatment, pictured above. STAT’s Drew Joseph wrote about Schett (who doesn’t care if you pronounce his first name “George or Gay-org”), the patients whose lives have been changed, and the gold rush among drugmakers to turn the science into approved medicines.