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Science Friday

CAR-T Cell Therapy For Autoimmune Diseases | Measuring Early Life Adversity—In Marmots

Science Friday

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Life Sciences, Wnyc, Science, Earth Sciences, Natural Sciences, Friday

4.55.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2024

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In a Chinese study, donor CAR-T cells sent autoimmune diseases into remission. There’s hope that the therapy is scalable. And, scientists used decades of yellow-bellied marmot research to find a way to measure how adverse events affect wild animals’ survival.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Listener supported WNYC Studios.

0:11.3

Autoimmune diseases have been considered incurable, but a treatment that's been successful

0:18.3

for cancer could move the needle in the right direction.

0:21.9

The likelihood that this could expand elsewhere is really promising depending on the safety and efficacy of carty cell therapy.

0:28.4

It's Wednesday, November 13th, and today is Science Friday.

0:35.3

I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis.

0:38.3

If you struggle with an autoimmune disease like lupus or multiple sclerosis, you're

0:43.6

familiar with the frustrations that come from not having an available cure.

0:48.4

But there have been scattered studies that show patient progress after using car-ticell

0:53.6

therapy.

0:54.8

A new breakthrough shows it could be more scalable as a treatment than we've thought possible.

1:00.1

We'll get to that story in just a bit, but first, let's learn some lessons about stress from an unusual source.

1:07.4

Marmits. Here's Ira Flato.

1:10.3

It's well established in psychology that if you experience trauma as a child, chances are it'll

1:16.9

impact your physical and mental health as an adult and could even affect your economic status.

1:22.3

In academic terms, this is called early adversity, and psychologists have developed a scoring system for measuring

1:31.0

the cumulative effect of early adversity in childhood, which can include abuse and household dysfunction,

1:37.7

and it can help predict health risks later in life. So we can specifically measure that in humans, but what about in other animals? For example,

1:47.6

if you've adopted a dog that's had a turbulent past, you know that that can result in reclusive

1:53.4

or skittish behavior as an adult. But there hasn't been a good way to measure it in non-primate

2:00.3

animals. Well, a new study from UCLA, published in the

2:03.8

journal Ecology Letters, establishes a similar index for non-primate animals for the first time,

...

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