Doctors have discovered that a new groundbreaking therapy has reversed incurable blood cancers in some patients.
A therapy, that would once have been considered a feat of science fiction has reversed aggressive blood cancer in some patients.
As reported by the doctors, the treatment involves precisely editing the DNA in white blood cells to transform them into a cancer-fighting ‘living drug.’
Leukemia, or blood cancer, is one of the most common cancers, especially in children.
It initiates due to the overproduction of abnormal white blood cells in the bone marrow, leading to symptoms like fatigue, infections, and bleeding, but it is often highly curable with early treatment.
Doctors have exceptionally revealed a cure to the impossible treatment of cancer as a type of ‘gene therapy’ called BE-CAR7.
Patients who received it saw their early trials, saw their cancer disappear completely, and stayed cancer-free for years.
Experts said this could be a major turning point in blood cancer treatment.
Leukemia is a cancer of the blood that starts in the bone marrow, where blood cells are made, and one of its aggressive types is called ‘T-cell leukemia.’
T-cells are supposed to be the body's guardians – seeking out and destroying threats – but in leukemia, they abnormally grow out of control.
As reported by BBC, the first girl to receive BE-CAR7 treatment was a 13-year-old girl whose cancer left no trace within 28 days of the treatment and still free of the disease since 2022.
After her successful treatment, the trial was then expanded, and two more adults and 8 children with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia have been treated, with almost two-thirds (64%) of patients in remission.
In BE-CAR7 treatment, doctors use healthy immune cells from a donor which are carefully changed in the lab using a precise gene-editing method. Scientists make three important changes:
The cells are altered so the patient’s body does not reject them and are prevented from attacking each other.
These cells are trained to recognize and kill cancer cells, and once they are injected into a patient's body, they act like a living drug, hunting down and destroying cancer cells in the blood.
The team of doctors at University College London UCL and Great Ormond Street Hospital used technology for treating blood cancer called ‘base editing.’
The four types of bases in DNA—adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T)—are the building blocks of our genetic code, and billions of bases in our DNA spell out the instruction manual for our body.
Base editing method allows scientists to zoom to a precise part of the genetic code and then alter the molecular structure of just one base, converting it from one type to another and rewriting the instruction manual.
The newly discovered treatment of blood cancer evaluates, that researchers wanted to harness the natural power of healthy T-cells to seek out and destroy threats and turn that against the T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
