WEB DESK
A teenage girl’s incurable cancer has been cleared from her body with the first use of a revolutionary new type of medicine in a UK hospital. All other treatments for the girl’s leukemia had failed. 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 last year. Her cancer was aggressive. Chemotherapy, and then a bone-marrow transplant, were unable to rid it from her body, the BBC reported.
Base editing allows scientists to zoom into 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.