A therapy that would once have been considered a feat of science fiction has reversed aggressive and incurable blood cancers in some patients, doctors report.
The treatment involves precisely editing the DNA in white blood cells to transform them into a cancer-fighting “living drug”.
The first girl to be treated, whose story we reported in 2022, is still free of the disease and now plans to become a cancer scientist.
Now eight more children and two adults with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia have been treated, with almost two thirds (64%) of patients in remission.
T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia was and is one of the most curable cancers, even before the advent of stem cell transplantation, up tp 80% of people had a good prognosis. There’s a reason this therapy has been used in such a small number of people, it costs the GDP of a micro state so it’s usually reserved for extremely complicated cases. The principle is roughly the same as the Berlin patient but the cells are your own edited cells rather than matched donors.
And costs go down when you treat more people. There is considerable risk so it makes sense to only use it on patients when it’s a choice of a more comfortable death or cure.