Six months after treatment, Alyssa is “doing well” and is back home in Leicester, central England, where she is under medical supervision.
British doctors have defended the effectiveness of an innovative treatment for aggressive leukemia, the most common form of cancer in children, after the first patient to benefit from it went into remission.
Alyssa, a 13-year-old teenager, was diagnosed with T acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 2021. However, her blood cancer did not respond to conventional treatments, mainly chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant.
Therefore he participated in a clinical trial of the children’s hospital Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children of London for a new treatment that uses genetically modified immune cells taken from a healthy volunteer.
In 28 days she went into remission, which allowed her to undergo a second bone marrow transplant to restore her immune system, British researchers revealed this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology.
Six months later, Alyssa is “doing well” and is back at her home in Leicester, central England, where she is under medical supervision.
“Without this experimental treatment, Alyssa’s only option would be palliative care,” the hospital said in a statement today.
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia affects the cells of the immune system, the B and T lymphocytes, which fight and protect against viruses.
Alyssa is the first patient known to have received modified T cells, the hospital noted. The treatment involves chemically changing letters of the DNA code.
Researchers at the hospital and University College London helped develop the use of modified T cells to treat B-cell leukemias in 2015.
However, these T cells designed to attack cancer cells ended up killing each other during the production process, prompting scientists to think of other solutions.
“This is an excellent demonstration of how, with dedicated teams and infrastructure, we can combine cutting-edge technologies in the laboratory with concrete results in the hospital for patients,” said Wasim Kasim, consultant immunologist and professor at GOSH.
This “opens the way to other new treatments and ultimately to a better future for sick children,” he added. Leukemia is the most common form of cancer in children.
Alisa states in a statement that she did the test for herself, but also for the other children who are sick.
“I hope this will prove that the research works and that it can be recommended to more children” who suffer from the disease, adds her mother, Kiona.
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