British doctors, using a new type of therapy – the so -called editing of the foundations, were able to cure a teenage girl from leukemia.
BBC writes that all other methods of treatment of 13-year-old Alissa turned out to be unsuccessful, so doctors of the world famous London Children’s Hospital Great Ormond Street created a new medicine for her. After six months of cancer cells in her body, no.
In May last year, Alissa was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Under normal conditions, T-cells are defenders of the body, but Alice had their activities from under control and began to pose a danger. The girl had an aggressive variety of cancer. Chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant did not help.
What happened later, several years ago it was impossible to imagine, notes BBC. GREAT ORMOD STRIT team used genetic editing technology, which appeared just six years ago.
What is the editing of the grounds? Nitrogenous bases are organic compounds that make up nucleic acids. Four types of bases – adenin (a), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and Timin (T) are bricks of the human genetic code. Like the letters of the alphabet, billions of foundations in human DNA make up instructions for his body.
editing the bases allows scientists to choose a specific part of the genetic code and then change the molecular structure of only one base, converting it into another and changing genetic instructions. A team of doctors and scientists used this tool to create a new type of T cells that can track and kill cancer T-cells in the body of Alissa. This purpose was healthy donor T cells.
The first modification turned off the mechanism of aiming the T-cells of Alissa so that they attacked her body. The second rule removed the antigen leukocytes CD7, which is in all T cells. The third edition made it possible to prevent cell death from chemotherapy, making them “invisible” for the medicine. At the last stage of the genetic modification of T-cells, it was instructed to hunt for all the cells in which the CD7 protein was present to destroy all T cells in its body, including cancer ..
Alissa remained vulnerable to infections, since during the treatment the cancer T cells in her body and those that protected her from diseases were attacked. A month later, Alice had remission, and she was made a second bone marrow transplant to restore her immune system. After the examination after three months, the doctors were alarmed, as the girl again found signs of cancer. But the two subsequent examinations showed the complete absence of cancer cells.
Dr. David Liu from the Broud Institute, one of the inventors of the method, considers it amazing and unusual that the new method began to be used to treat people just six years after its development. In the therapy developed for Alissa, each editing of the bases included the destruction of the genetic code so that it no longer worked.