EUROPE: Doctors at Great Street Ormond Hospital in London have successfully developed a type of gene editing that can target malignant organisms inside the body and eradicate them. Even though the treatment is in its elementary stages, it looks like the procedure has a star testimonial so far, saving the life of a 12-month-old baby diagnosed with drug-resistant leukemia—marking the first time this treatment has been used.
The infant, named Layla, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia when she was three months old. Despite standard cancer treatments like chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant—therapies which tend to work on older patients—her condition did not improve.
It was then that the parents gave permission for doctors to use their experimental gene therapy, in which immune cells from a donor were genetically engineered to detect and fight off cancerous cells and then implant them in the body. To create the edited genes themselves, the scientists used “molecular scissors”—what is essentially a mingling of DNA sequences with designated cells that can morph or mutate genes.
