A group of French doctors have finally found the cure for Sickle Cell Anaemia.
According to BBC News, this became possible after a French teenager’s sickle cell disease was reversed using a pioneering treatment to change his DNA.
The world-first procedure at Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris offers hope to millions of people with the blood disorder. The report revealed that scientists altered the genetic instructions in his bone marrow so it made healthy red blood cells. So far, the therapy has worked for 15 months and the child is no longer on any medication.
Sickle cell disease causes normally round red blood cells, which carry oxygen around the body, to become shaped like a sickle. These deformed cells can lock together to block the flow of blood around the body. This can cause intense pain, organ damage and can be fatal.
The teenager who received the treatment had so much internal damage he needed to have his spleen removed and his hips replaced. Every month he had to go into hospital to have a blood transfusion to dilute his defective blood. But when he was 13, doctors at the Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris did something unique.
Doctors removed his bone marrow – the part of the body that makes blood. They then genetically altered it in a lab to compensate for the defect in his DNA that caused the disease. The corrected bone marrow was then put back into the patient.
The results in the New England Journal of Medicine showed the teenager has been making normal blood since the procedure 15 months ago.
Philippe Leboulch, a professor of medicine at the University of Paris, told the BBC News website: “So far the patient has no sign of the disease, no pain, no hospitalisation. He no longer requires a transfusion so we are quite pleased with that.
“But of course we need to perform the same therapy in many patients to feel confident that it is robust enough to propose it as a mainstream therapy.”
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