What happens when you're struck by lightning?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Future Proof with Jonathan McRae on Newstalk. Proudly supported by Research Ireland.
Hello and welcome to Future Proof, the podcast. This is the show where we take a closer look at the world around us. I'm Jonathan McRae. Thank you for subscribing, downloading, rating. If you like the show, let people know. We really appreciate it. Coming up on this week's episode, we'll be speaking to a lightning expert about what happens when 100 million volts pass through your body. If you'd like to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us, scienceatnewstalk.com. We get to all of your comments at the end of the pod. First, though, it's time to look back at the more interesting stories from the world of science this week. We're joined by Dr. Jessamyn Fairfield from the University of Galway and science communicator Owen Murphy.
You're both very welcome. Our first story.
It's got to be something else.
Lupus could cause... No. Lupus progresses slower. There'd be joint pain.
What happens when 100 million volts pass through your body?
So it's not a typical case. We should get an A&A. It's not lupus.
Has to do with lupus, Jess.
That's right, and a possible new cure for lupus, or at least a new treatment that can reduce its symptoms really dramatically, using immunotherapy. So lupus, if you're not familiar, is this chronic autoimmune disease. It affects about 5 million people worldwide, and it's a really nasty piece of work. It's where your immune system basically attacks healthy tissue, which can result in lots of inflammation, fatigue, but also damage to your internal organs, like your kidneys, your lungs, your heart. It's a really, really... a bad disease and a disease that's quite hard to treat as well because if you think about you know for very severe cases of lupus how could you reduce the sort of immune activity in your body if you reduce the thing that is causing lupus you then also reduce your immune system and its ability to respond to other stuff so
It's been a really persistent and difficult disease to treat for a long time. But this new kind of therapy that was trialed in a study by University College London and the NHS in the UK actually found incredibly good response using this new immunotherapy. So it's a type of therapy that's actually already been used to treat different types of blood cancers. And basically what they do is they take your T cells, so these immune cells in the body, they take some of them out. And they teach them how to identify some of the like rogue B cells or the rogue immune cells that are causing the lupus itself. Yeah. They take them out. They sort of reprogram them. They put them back in. And one thing that's amazing about this treatment is that it's a one time treatment.
It's not like a medication that you have to take. It's not an ongoing thing. It is a one-time reinfusion of these modified T cells. It's called CAR T cell therapy. So the CAR is chimeric antigen receptors, which is the type of change that they're providing to the T cells. But basically what they found is actually really, really good remission rates in the patients that have been treated with these modified T cells. And again, it's sort of their own body cells that are being taught how to not do the thing that they were doing when you had lupus. And the number of people in this trial was quite small. But initially, the patients that they treated with a lower dose had very, very good response. Most of them were able to just go off of their lupus medications entirely.
Wow. They're now doing a secondary trial with a higher dose to see, does that act faster? Is it still safe? And the next step, of course, is larger trials because there have been a few small trials of this type of treatment for lupus over the last, like, 10 years or so, they're very, very promising. But for it to be a commercially available treatment, you have to make sure that it's safe and that it works for everybody.
These therapies can be very expensive. And governments then are often quite slow to say, yeah, sure, no problem, and sign off on them. I think the mood is shifting a little bit.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:50
2
What happens when 100 million volts pass through your body?
0:50–6:54
3
How does lightning differ from electrical injuries?
6:54–10:31
4
What are the common injuries from lightning strikes?
10:31–12:13
5
Why do some people survive lightning strikes?
12:13–44:09