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By Gardy Chacha
In April this year, Emily Whitehead, a six-year-old girl from Philadelphia in the US, had been fighting Leukaemia for two years.
Leukemia is cancer of the blood cells and starts in the bone marrow where these cells are made. Latest statistics indicate that Leukemia accounts for about 33 per cent of cancer cases in children aged 0-14 years.
Doctors had exhausted all traditional treatments and Emily would not be in remission long enough to attempt a bone marrow transplant.
Out of options, Emily’s parents turned to the Cancer Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which was testing a pioneering new therapy.
The therapy known as CTL019, involved using a disabled form of HIV to carry cancer-fighting genes into a patient’s T-cells (disease fighting cells). The idea being that this would re-programme one’s immune system to recognise the cancer cells and start killing them.
Trial leader, Dr Stephan Grupp, put Emily into the programme. He checked Emily’s bone marrow after three months and again after six months and found she no longer had cancerous cells.
Human Immunodefiency Virus (HIV) attacks and destroys the body’s CD4+ cells which are part of the body’s immune system that fights infection and disease.
With a weakened or destroyed immune system, the body becomes susceptible to numerous illnesses. This is what makes Emily’s case especially astonishing; that a virus, associated with millions of deaths for decades now, became a tool used to save a life.
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