I'm not sure it counts as "revolutionary" if it has helped only 1 person, and maybe as many as 10-12 per year. It's really the opposite of revolutionary, though I am very happy for this family and their daughter.
This is like the ultimate form of Unimpressed Internet Guy.
The article even talks about other trials also underway, so the parent comment doesn't even make any sense:
> Dr Robert Chiesa, from the bone-marrow transplant department at Great Ormond Street Hospital, said: "It is extremely exciting. Obviously, this is a new field in medicine and it's fascinating that we can redirect the immune system to fight cancer."
> The technology, though, only scratches the surface of what base editing could achieve.
> Dr David Liu, one of the inventors of base editing at the Broad Institute, told me it was "a bit surreal" that people were being treated just six years after the technology was invented.
> In Alyssa's therapy, each of the base edits involved breaking a section of genetic code so it no longer worked. But there are more nuanced applications where instead of switching an instruction off you can fix a defective one. Sickle-cell anaemia, for example, is caused by just one base change that could be corrected.
> So there are already trials of base editing under way in sickle-cell disease, as well as high cholesterol that runs in families and the blood disorder beta-thalassemia.
Actually, it's the other way around. The treatment described is an adaption of CAR-T (Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell) therapy, which was approved for use in the United States in 2017, to the patient's specific form of leukemia. It's a challenging adaptation because the cancer cells being targeted are the same type of T-cells that are used in CAR-T therapy, thus requiring the use of donor T-cells, and a number of modifications that are unnecessary when CAR-T is used for other cancers. Base editing makes that easier than earlier forms of CRISPR. But base editing isn't the therapy here, CAR-T is, and while CAR-T is certainly relatively, this patient is not the first to receive, just the first with her particular leukiemia.
No, the parent comment is totally fine. The technique is indeed new and yes will be applied in the treatment of other diseases in the future. Don’t know why you went to open with a contrarian tone.
My point was simply that this is an adaptation of an existing therapeutic tool (CAR-T) to a particular cancer, not something completely novel. It's a leaf on a tree of therapies, not a new tree per se.
