A teenage girl’s incurable cancer (leukemia) has been cleared from her body with the first use of a revolutionary new type of medicine in a UK hospital.
Key facts
- Doctors at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital used a technology called “base editing”, invented only six years ago, to perform a feat of biological engineering to build her a new living drug.
- Six months later the cancer is undetectable, but the teenager is still being monitored in case it comes back.
- Alyssa, who is 13 and from Leicester, UK, was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia in May 2021r. Her cancer was aggressive. Chemotherapy, and then a bone-marrow transplant, were unable to rid it from her body.
What is Base editing?
- Bases are the language of life. The four types of bases are;- adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T).
- These are the building blocks of our genetic code. Just as letters in the alphabet spell out words that carry meaning, the billions of bases in our DNA spell out the instruction manual for our body.
- Base editing allows scientists to zoom to a precise part of the genetic code and then alter the molecular structure of just one base, converting it into another and changing the genetic instructions.
- The large team of doctors and scientists used this tool to engineer a new type of T-cell that was capable of hunting down and killing Alyssa’s cancerous T-cells.
- These T-cells are supposed to be the body’s guardians -seeking out and destroying threats but for Alyssa, they had become the danger and were growing out of control.
About T cells
- T cells are types of white blood cells. T cells are part of the immune system and develop from stem cells in the bone marrow.
- They help protect the body from infection and may help fight cancer. Also called T lymphocyte and thymocyte.
- They maintain immune homeostasis in humans over decades but can also be responsible for inflammatory or autoimmune diseases.
(Source: BBC)
