Two children treated with gene-edited cells to kill their cancers are both doing well more than a year later. The baby girls were both given the experimental treatment only as a last resort, but clinical trials of the therapy are now getting underway in children and adults in the UK.
An 11-month-old girl called Layla was the first to get the treatment, in June 2015. When the team treated her,…they stressed that it was too soon to say if she was cured.
But 18 months on, Layla is doing well with no sign of the leukemia returning. A second child, who was treated in December 2015 when she was 16 months old, is also healthy.
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The treatment is a form of so-called CAR-T cell therapy. This involves using a virus to add a gene to immune cells that make them target specific cancers.
[The study can be found here.]The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Gene editing has saved the lives of two children with leukaemia