Blood Cancer: A team of London researchers has designed a revolutionary gene-therapy-based method that could assist millions suffering from blood cancer by drastically improving their treatment. The researchers are raising their hope, as much as anybody else in the world, at the new technique using donor-derived, genetically-modified immune cells.
This news is made possible through the work of specialists at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) and University College London (UCL). Researchers are pursuing T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (T-ALL) of children with this aggressive rare blood cancer. Immune cells from healthy donors are genetically modified to offer life-saving replacements for patients currently not responding to treatments as the new therapeutic approach.
This new therapy, BE-CAR7, appears to be suitable for both adults and children and has shown promising early results.
To make BE-CAR7, the first thing a team of scientists did was acquire immune cells from a donor and then modify them via base editing-an advanced CRISPR gene editing process-which allows precise and accurate changes the selected areas of DNA so that the donor cells can eliminate the cancer-affected cells without eliciting an objection to immune responses.
One of the immunologists working on the study, Professor Waseem Qasim, says, “This might offer the basis of safer and more effective therapies for children affected by very aggressive kinds of leukemia.”
Leukaemia occurs when aberrantly functioning white blood cells multiply rapidly within the bone marrow. Among the two groups of blood malignancies, the more common one is found mainly in children, while the other is found mainly among the elderly.
India now has the highest rank in leukaemia after China and the USA. One Indian gets diagnosed with blood cancer every five minutes, and the disease causes around seventy thousand deaths each year.
Researchers, however, boast about the new invention, which they have pitched as a game-changer from this rather lamentable reality and a source of renewed hope to patients and families everywhere: Be-CAR7 is indeed looking for change.
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