Babies Are Cured Of Cancer Thanks To Pioneering Treatment

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Doctors in London say they have successfully cured two babies suffering from Leukemia, in the world's first attempt to treat this disease with genetically engineered donor immune cells, reports MIT Technology review.

The experiments, which took place at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in the English capital, open up the possibility of treating patients with cheap techniques that can be applied to patients at any time.

This could pose a threat to the millionaire investigations of laboratories that were working on similar methods. The fundamental difference with this case is that the cells used had undergone up to four genetic modifications and came from a donor rather than from the patient himself.

Therefore, with this treatment, cells could be extracted from any donor, altered and created hundreds of doses that can be frozen to be used when necessary.

The famous cells of this treatment are T cells or lymphocytes, also known as white blood cells, which when altered attack cancer cells of leukemia.

The babies, 11 and 16 months old respectively, had undergone other procedures previously without success, according to the journal Science Translational Medicine in a publication last Wednesday.

These types of treatments have not yet been commercialized, although they have shown great effectiveness against blood cancers. According to studies by laboratories such as Novartis and Juno, approximately half of the patients are free of the disease.

The United States and China are competing for new treatments to cure cancer and other diseases using manipulated cells.