World's first gene editing therapy frees girl from her incurable cancer

Guwahati, Dec 13: A 13-year-old patient, Allysa, from Leicester has been declared cancer-free after receiving the world's first base-edited T-cells treatment for Leukaemia.

Alyssa was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic Leukaemia (T-ALL) in 2021. She had tried all the conventional therapies for her blood cancer but nothing worked and her Leukaemia relapsed. Not willing to give up, Alyssa enrolled in a clinical trial and was admitted to the Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) Unit at Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in London. Here, she received Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cells that had been genetically edited from a healthy volunteer donor. It was a first-of-its-kind therapy.

After successfully receiving the immune cells, she went on to receive a second bone marrow transplant to help restore her immune system.

Earlier, her doctors had stated that without this treatment, her next option would have been palliative care.

Alyssa was the first patient of the ground-breaking trial which was funded by the Medical Research Council. Meanwhile, Scientists are working to recruit more patients for the clinical trial. They are likely to test this form of treatment on more patients who have exhausted all conventional options.