Ehhh, maybe? If I'm reading the article right (and I haven't yet gone digging past the article to the source itself because that takes more time than I currently have), it's targeting t cells only. Rejection involves more than just t cells though.
It might be at least partially effective, I'm not trained in the field to be able to predict that much, just basing what I'm saying off of past reading and general information.
I'm not confident in this, though. It's pretty damn far beyond the level of actual training I've had. I can say confidently that the basic techniques they're talking about should be applicable to more than just autoimmune disorders, just not the degree of efficacy.
There's just so many more cells involved in something like hyperacute and acute rejection that it's likely to be something that would have to be more complicated than the already complicated technique they're working on.
I would say that, if this proves to work in actual humans safely and effectively, that the immune related cancers would be the more probable beneficiaries of the method.
See, most of the autoimmune stuff is a "false positive" the body at some point got fooled by some kind of external agent, that happened to match some part of the body. So, if you wipe out the "memory" of that false positive, the body stops attacking itself.
The cancers that are immune related should respond in a similar way. You'd still have the malignant cells, but it should stop new ones from going crazy, and the usual methods of killing off the existing malignant cells should effectively "cure" the person with drastically reduced chances of relapse.
But with transplants, there's no false positive. There actually are foreign cells in the body, being constantly exposed to immune cells. There's also usually more than one kind of cell, so the method they're using probably would need multiple efforts to work at all, and would likely need to be administered regularly. I'm fairly confident that the method could reduce severity of rejection, but that's still only fairly lol. But, (disclaimer again), the method should work in either a single or small number of treatments for autoimmune diseases.
I hope like hell this gets into human trials fast. I have a personal stake in it (hence all the reading lol) and what this thing can't do is undo the damage already done. The person being treated is still going to have whatever degree of disability the disease already caused, so the sooner people can start the treatment, the better off they are.
Most of the diseases explicitly listed as targets for this treatment are fucking brutal. Just one year with MS, as an example, can take someone from healthy and active to being half blind, or unable to walk unaided, or any number of other issues. MS already takes time to diagnose, so pretty much everyone that has it has some degree of disability by the time they start existing treatments. And the existing treatments, as incredible as they are, don't fully prevent new damage occurring. Nor do all of them work at full efficacy for everyone. You can end up having to try multiple treatments to find the right one for your immune system.
So, most MS patients have a serious amount of time before their disease even gets slowed. My wife, from diagnosis to first partially effective treatment, went almost a year, and lost so damn much from that time plus the effects from before diagnosis. You're talking someone that was modeling and a jogger being unable to walk down a hallway until over a year of physical therapy, and still can't handle long walks.
And she didn't even lose as much as some people do. She also deals with what's called relapsing/remitting MS (RRMS) which takes breaks between attacks. People with primary progressive MS (PPMS) can lose function faster and more severely. It's a fucking terrifying disease.
This is starting to go very long and tangential, so I'll stop after this bit.
I hope like hell it will work for not only the listed diseases, but rejection too. Gods, the lives it could make better if it can do all of that would change the world, along with the individual lives. It would be the scientific equivalent of a miracle cure.
