A teenage girl is free of her terminal cancer after world-first cell engineering. Alyssa, 13, had undergone chemotherapy and a failed bone marrow transplant which failed to clear her Leukaemia.
The Leicester girl then received base-edited T-cells in the first ever use of a base-edited cell therapy at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH).
Within a month she went into remission.
Speaking about the experimental new treatment, Alyssa said: ‘Once I do it, people will know what they need to do, one way or another, so doing this will help people – of course I’m going to do it.’
Alyssa, who was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (T-ALL) in 2021, was given all the conventional treatments, but the disease returned.
She is now the first patient enrolled onto a new clinical trial, funded by the Medical Research Council, during which she was given universal CAR (Chimeric Antigen Receptor) T-cells that had been pre-manufactured from a healthy volunteer donor in May this year.
Scientists said that without the treatment her only next step would have been palliative care.
