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Hi everybody, it's Mike Putman. I'm a rheumatologist at the Medical College of Wisconsin and today I'm coming to you from ACR 2026 to talk about abstract 0928 — CATCHER T cells for the antigen-specific treatment of ANCA-associated vasculitis.
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Now I am not a big person to talk about basic science things, but I also love science fiction.
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And if you want to know the number one science fiction cool thing that I saw in the basic science realm this meeting, this is definitely it.
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So the problem today is that we are all about B cells.
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We have CAR-T, we have BiTEs, we have all these ways of killing B cells more dramatically and broader and deeper, but a lot of those B cells are good.
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One of the biggest problems that our patients face is actually infection, and killing all the B cells hurts the infection risk.
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So the abstract that I just got back from — one of the ANCA-associated vasculitis abstract sessions — talked about these CATCHER cells that are
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being developed by Max Konig's group at Hopkins, with the goal of targeting specifically the bad B cells, which are a tiny fraction of the
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overall B cell population.
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And if only we could fix them, maybe we could get all of the benefits with very few of the harms.
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So this isn't a mouse model — full disclosure, this is still #InMice.
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But what they did is they took and they edited human T cells to create these CATCHER PR3 T cells.
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You can imagine that of all the B cells in your body, there are some that are making the PR3 antibodies that are causing a lot of the havoc in ANCA-associated vasculitis.
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What if we could kill just those? They made CAR-T cells that will selectively go after just those.
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So the presentation itself was super cool.
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They have all these beautiful rotating antibody models and if you ever have a chance you should definitely drop by one of them.
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They initially made cells that were not selective enough.
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So then they used AlphaFold, and they restructured their molecule and they kind of evolved it over time — they engineered it to be more specific.
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It's honestly pretty wild. At the end of it they had these cells that would specifically kill the PR3-producing B cells.
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Now, after that they said, all right, let's validate in a mouse model.
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And so they did that — they engineered some mice that expressed PR3, and then they gave them these cells, and they went in and
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killed all the bad B cells in the bone marrow and the spleen and the liver — all of the tissues that we think are
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sometimes hard to get to for our normal approach to B cell inhibition.
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So this is still in mice — we're not there to human trials yet — but I love sci-fi, and if there's anything at the meeting where I say that is the thing that will eventually cure vasculitis, which is one of my favorite diseases to treat, this is the thing that would do it.
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So keep your eye out for this. It's CAR-T, but a more specific version of it called CATCHER T cells.
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And I think it was a really neat thing that I saw at the meeting this year.
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Thanks so much for tuning in to all of our coverage.
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