That effectively describes treatment today. The harmful cells must be eliminated, but at the same time the medications being used destroy some of the good cells. As a consequence, the medications which are attempting to bring a portion of the system under control end up being destructive to the body's entire structure. However, there is a new approach to therapy with lupus on the horizon and it's a revolutionary new concept. The most exciting scientific endeavor today is genetic engineering.
Genes are the building blocks of the cell that determine what a cell does.
Genetic engineering or gene therapy in 1992 is such that it may be possible that any cell of the body can be taken and may be turned into any other kind of cell. Immune cells are really daughters of a mother cell. Those cells die off over time and they need to be constantly replenished and they get replenished from the bone marrow where the mother cells are located. Laboratory research has demonstrated that where mother cells were taken from a mouse with lupus and given to a normal mouse, that mouse developed lupus. What has been discovered is that an autoimmune disease can actually be induced by taking the bone marrow from an animal with the disease and giving it to another.