WND 12/12/2022
Genetic manipulation is now a 'very fast-moving area'A new advance in medicine, a field that appears never to be static, is allowing doctors to cure a girl's incurable cancer.
The girl, identified in a report by the BBC as Alyssa, suffered from leukemia.
So physicians at the United Kingdom's Great Ormond Street Hospital turned to "base editing" to save her.
They used biological engineering to build her a new living drug, and six months later, her cancer is undetectable, the report said.
It was a diagnosis of T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia last year that threatened the 13-year-old from Leicester.
The report explained T-cells seek out and destroy threats to the body, but in Alyssa were surging out of control, threatening her very life after chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant failed.
Then the medical team at the hospital turned to base editing, a procedure invented only a few years ago.
The BBC explained: "Bases are the language of life. The four types of base - adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) - are the building blocks of our genetic code. Just as letters in the alphabet spell out words that carry meaning, the billions of bases in our DNA spell out the instruction manual for our body. Base editing allows scientists to zoom to a precise part of the genetic code and then alter the molecular structure of just one base, converting it into another and changing the genetic instructions. The large team of doctors and scientists used this tool to engineer a new type of T-cell that was capable of hunting down and killing Alyssa's cancerous T-cells."
More:
https://www.wnd.com/2022/12/science-gives-doctors-way-cure-incurable-cancer/
