T regs are back - promising to do for autoimmunity what CAR Ts have done in cancer

Drug developers are giving regulatory T cells a second look as treatments for autoimmune disease. The difference this time is that they can leverage orthogonal benefits from CAR T cells in cancer, capitalizing on new tools for boosting potency and persistence, plus regulatory breakthroughs, to yield a new class of cell therapies.

Some of the tools come from gene editing, others from synthetic biology, indicating a convergence of new technologies that could lead to the first successful use of CAR T constructs outside of cancer...