Modified immune cells from their own blood help six people with severe rheumatoid arthritis, three no longer need medication

Rheumatoid arthritis is a disease in which the immune system attacks the body's own joints. They become inflamed, hurt and can be permanently damaged. Medicines usually keep the disease well under control, but for a small group of patients they do not work well enough. According to the Charité, the six participants in this study had already tried up to eight different modern arthritis medicines over ten years.

Researchers at the Charité, Berlin's university hospital, gave them a single infusion of their own immune cells, which had been modified in the lab. This kind of treatment is called a cell therapy. The results were published on 27 August this year in the scientific journal Nature Medicine. In November 2026 the researchers presented them at ACR Convergence, the annual congress of the American association of rheumatologists.

How the treatment works

B cells play a major role in rheumatoid arthritis. These are immune cells that make antibodies, and in this disease some of them make antibodies against the body itself. The treatment is called CAR-T. Doctors take T cells, another type of immune cell, from the patient's blood. In the lab, these cells are given an extra recognition part that lets them find a protein on the outside of B cells. Back in the body, the modified T cells clear away the B cells.

The idea is that the immune system can then start again, without the B cells that attacked the joints. Beforehand, the patients received a short course of medicines that temporarily lower the number of immune cells, to give the modified cells room.

The results

The disease eased in all six patients. After 36 weeks, four of the six were in remission: the disease had calmed down and the inflammation had almost disappeared. Three of the six no longer needed any arthritis medication by the end of the study. The patients were followed for eight months to a year. In one patient the disease returned, after first being in remission without medication.

When B cells came back after the treatment, they were mainly young, new cells, according to the Charité. For now, the B cells linked to the disease were no longer detectable in almost all patients. Protection from earlier vaccinations, such as against tetanus, was preserved.

All six had a mild to moderate inflammatory reaction throughout the body, which often occurs after this treatment. It passed in everyone. The researchers saw no serious nerve problems or other serious side effects.

What comes next

Six patients is a small group, and the longest follow-up is one year. In a next step, the researchers will compare the treatment in ten additional patients with an approved arthritis medicine that also targets B cells. The therapy is called mivocabtagene autoleucel, or miv-cel for short, and comes from the American company Kyverna Therapeutics. Kyverna supported the study, but according to the Charité it had no influence on the design or the analysis.

The same therapy previously also helped people with stiff person syndrome, a rare disease in which the immune system attacks the nervous system. A year after a single treatment, they walked considerably faster. In both diseases the immune system attacks the body itself, and in both cases miv-cel clears away the B cells.

What does this mean for the road to the singularity?

People with a severe autoimmune disease often take medicines that suppress the disease for the rest of their lives. A single treatment that lets the immune system start again would be a big change for them. This small study shows that it worked in six people with severe rheumatoid arthritis. Larger studies with a comparison group now need to show in how many patients the effect lasts, and for how long. If that succeeds, the same approach could also help with other diseases in which the immune system attacks the body itself.

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