Progress With Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration in Cell Therapy for Autoimmune Disease

This is the second part of an interview with David Porter, MD. For the first part, click here.

David Porter, MD
Credit: Penn Medicine

As chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) has made its way from oncology into the landscape of treatment modalities under evaluation for the treatment of autoimmune disease, the need for interdisciplinary collaboration has become clear. Indeed, formal efforts have already been established to foster collaboration and knowledge-sharing between oncologists with experience using cell therapy in the clinic and autoimmune disease specialists.

In order to check in about the progress in this area, CGTLive® spoke with David Porter, MD, the director of cell therapy and transplant at Penn Medicine, to get his perspective. Porter emphasized that efforts in 2024 showed the feasibility of such collaboration and also summed up his main message regarding the current state of the field in general.

CGTLive: Can you discuss any progress that has been made with regard to fostering collaboration between cell therapy experts and autoimmune disease specialists?

David Porter, MD: Really a key to this whole endeavor is collaboration, to have people with various expertise coming together for the benefit of a single patient and a patient population. That does involve experts in cell therapy—experts in managing the cell therapy, the toxicities, but also all the logistics that go around the cell therapy episode of care—with the disease experts. I will say it's been tremendously rewarding at my institution—at University of Pennsylvania—that we've been able to put together a cross-disciplinary group with expertise in all these areas who have worked beautifully together. I think that's going to be critical to the success of this field. I think that that's well understood in the cell therapy and autoimmune areas. These are groups that are now starting to work closely together, that are starting to develop cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary programs to try and get cell therapy access for so many of these patients. I do think that is one of the learnings over the last year, how people can come together, collaborate, and develop these cross-disciplinary programs.

Looking at the bigger picture, do you have any main message for doctors?

I think the main message is that this is an exciting time. I think that cell therapy has potential that maybe other therapies do not for patients with autoimmune disease. The B-cell depletion is profound. It has the ability to eliminate some of these tissue-resident, pathogenic B-cells and autoantibodies.

But we we still have to learn from what we're doing. We still have to have caution. It's very, very early in the field. I don't think we've identified all the best targets, I don't think we've yet identified the best diseases to use cell therapy for, and the follow-up is short. But that said, I'm tremendously optimistic. I think we will learn that, and I think the early results are really, really encouraging.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.